Scraping sites with code

[Julian Bond <julian_bond@voidstar.com>]

Somebody has just told me that Google News look for PHP in the user 
agent and return 403 forbidden if they find it. It seems likely that 
they also look for other auto-generated code names.

FWIW http://www.google.com/robots.txt also bans robots from all the main 
directories.

I wonder how many other sites that routinely get scraped to produce RSS 
do the same thing.

For those of you using gnews2rss.php, coding round this is easy and left 
as an exercise for the php programmer. Using Curl or looking at the 
documentation for fopen() will solve the problem.

Meanwhile isn't it about time Google produced RSS themselves as an 
alternate output format from Search and News Search? Way back in June a 
senior Google person told me it was coming soon.

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