Amazonbot is finally respecting robots.txt

xxena about 2 hours ago 13 commentsRead Article on xeiaso.net

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Discussion (13 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

captn3m0•17 minutes ago

Good place to ask, saw a new AWS User agent in logs today: Amazon-Quick-on-Behalf-of-$HEXID

I found a mention on some user agent trackers but no official documentation. Anyone knows if it’s documented? Asking because I am seeing decent traffic (30GB/week) from this.

embedding-shape•5 minutes ago

Came across this recently too, seems to be from "Amazon Quick" where crawling other's websites is basically a feature of the product: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/quick/latest/userguide/web-crawl...

> Crawling behavior [...] Crawler identification: Identifies itself with user-agent string "aws-quick-on-behalf-of-<UUID>" in request headers.

Maybe people found a way of using it as a loophole for something or Amazon Quick is just picking up in usage, and your website is popular amongst whoever uses that sort of stuff.

iLoveOncall•6 minutes ago

Amazon Quick is the new name of Quicksight, which is the BI tool from AWS.

It has AI agents included so I guess this can just come from it searching the web based on user requests.

bstsb•about 1 hour ago

> Get Outlook for Mac

this bit made me laugh. was the email drafted in Outlook? was it sent to some sort of forwarding mailbox, or did they just BCC every customer in?

jacobn•about 1 hour ago

I just complained to them the other day! They were scraping our weather website to no end, very much including the disallowed path prefixes.

Did end up just adding them to our WAF blocklist, which is weirdly ironic - hosting on their infra & using their services to block their AI scraper...

BLKNSLVR•about 1 hour ago

I hope you leave it on the WAF. If they're only just deciding to respect robots.txt, which has been internet infrastructure forever, then it's probably still incredibly amateur software with 'Amazon-priorities' rather than 'responsible internet traffic' priorities.

TurdF3rguson•about 1 hour ago

Why does Amazonbot even exist, can someone explain? I don't understand why an ecommerce play would be crawling other websites.

input_sh•about 1 hour ago

To train AI. Not even a hyperbole, that is the only concrete example they list in their explanation: https://developer.amazon.com/amazonbot

> Amazonbot is used to improve our products and services. This helps us provide more accurate information to customers and may be used to train Amazon AI models.

tintor•about 1 hour ago

To ensure Amazon marketplace sellers aren't offering lower prices on other ecommerce websites. Also AI.

b112•11 minutes ago

I was wondering about this. And it makes me think this is all mistruth, unless they plan to drop this pricing tactic.

They've been getting some heat on it lately, but I find it hard to believe they're going to give up entirely? And if so, what's to stop someone from just flouting their rules on pricing, and then doing the robots.txt thing to prevent issues?

embedding-shape•about 1 hour ago

Amazonbot is specifically the user agent they use for crawling for "provide more accurate information to customers" (whatever that means, could be anything it sounds like) and also when they scrape for data used in AI training, according to https://developer.amazon.com/amazonbot

reaperducer•about 1 hour ago

AI. Gotta slurp the world.

arjie•about 1 hour ago

Huh, I get a lot of traffic from Amazonbot (relative to humans) and try as I might, it would get stuck in a tarpit of no creation because it would sit there and keep blasting every variation of my recent pages because Mediawiki lists many links. I have them appropriately nofollow and warning the bot not to waste its time with robots.txt but it just goes and sticks itself on nonsense internal pages.

The traffic isn't a problem. I've got Cloudflare in front and the machine itself is relatively overpowered, and downtime isn't critical. But I'd just like the thing to be able to spider me properly. Someone did point out to me that maybe I wasn't receiving actual Amazonbot but some other spider: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46352723

namegulf•about 1 hour ago

Robots.txt is lame BTW, there is no way to enforce it. It is up to the bot to decide to crawl or not and most cases they don't care.

Cloudflare had a nice technic to address the bot problem (if you use their name servers). It'll respect and use the robots.txt while sending the remaining bots to a deep black hole.

input_sh•about 1 hour ago

Yes, we know, its purpose is to guide the bots, not forcibly block them.

That said, one of the biggest websites in the world not respecting it is definitely a noteworthy story. Hopefully another one of the biggest websites in the world (formerly known as Twitter) eventually respects it as well instead of not even disclosing itself via a user agent and pretending to be Safari running on iOS.

namegulf•33 minutes ago

Why down vote a comment?

You're talking about one (yes, biggest) but millions of other bots don't follow must be a bigger story.

llbbdd•13 minutes ago

Yeah, robots.txt is a great herald example of the type of solution invented by people who don't understand incentives whatsoever.