this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
338 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
37712 readers
172 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
API calls are almost always private between the caller and the endpoint (think telegram bots or mobile apps). There isn't really a technically feasible way for a crawler to somehow "infer" any kind of knowledge of how api calls are being used unless the result has some kind of publically visible side effect (E. G. The program using the api is generating a web page and uploading it somewhere crawlable). Google et Al go by how many links from other pages to the page of interest exist (inbound links) and multiply by a smattering of other things like quality of keywords, length of content etc.
That said, if you're implying that the api changes mean that:
That is a plausible concern.
This is what I mean, the external references people had in the periphery will dry up. Like if I'm not using Infinity to generate better refined search results, now I don't post the link to Stack Exchange, and this reference fails to cascade across various copy paste blog resources. Now the original reddit post is a dead end source with no external weighted reference value. It's all of these advanced features implemented in the periphery using the free API that create the usefulness in the first place.
Searching reddit will be just like YouTube searches now. No matter what technical wording you use, you'll never find technical references again. I can type the title of a video on YT verbatim and still won't get the correct results, but I can log into an old account and find the content in my hundreds of playlists I kept as references. It is still there, it is still public.
Yeah that makes sense! I totally agree! Search is becoming pretty difficult these days!