How does Pinterest get around this then? They pollute image searches like crazy, and require you to login to see anything. At least they did, I blocked them from searches so maybe it's different now.

[–] gressen@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Easy - detect if you're getting accessed by a search crawler or a human. Serve a full page or just a login request.

[–] RGB3x3@lemmy.world 11 points 1 year ago (5 children)

So how can a user pretend to be a web crawler?

[–] dangrousperson@vlemmy.net 7 points 1 year ago

Ever heard of https://12ft.io/ ? It allows you to bypass alot of pay walls by basically pretending to be a search engine trying to index a website. For SEO reasons a lot of pay walled sites allow search engines to access the whole article to index. 12ft.io leverages this to show you whole articles behind paywalls. This is something you could also achieve by spoofing the User-Agent. It would probably work for things like Pinterest without an account as well, but that's something I have never tried (since I have no interest in the cancer that is Pinterest).

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