
Ask HN: Is Googlebot signing up for accounts on stackoverflow? - chatmasta
Today I googled a random programming question, and this was the result in google:<p>http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;5iRwd1q.png<p>Note the line &quot;Please click the link in the confirmation email to activate your subscription.&quot;<p>Why would googlebot ever scrape this text, unless it signed up for an account on stackoverflow?<p>The page in question:<p>http:&#x2F;&#x2F;askubuntu.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;562417&#x2F;how-do-you-update-npm-to-the-latest-version
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Garvey
Strangely enough, if I Google "install latest version of npm", I get the same
link as your screenshot, but the text is as follows:

"8 Answers 8. You can update nodejs by using npm itself, a PPA, or manually.
Or just tell it to install the latest stable version. Both may take a while.17
Dec 2014 14.04 - How do you update npm to the latest version? - Ask Ubuntu
askubuntu.com/questions/562417/how-do-you-update-npm-to-the-latest-version"

Does that mean that Google have activated the subscription?

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coppolaemilio
It could be possible that they do that, or that SO has granted more permission
to the google bot and that string is there by mistake. Good find!

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ganeshkrishnan
I changed my useragent to Googlebot and Googlebot smartphone and none of them
display the link for activating the subscription. Which means that SO had not
granted more permissions to Google Bot and possibly Google is registering? Is
this even possible?

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pyvek
Maybe this is an error on Stackoverflow's end, (i.e. serving "Please click the
link in the confirmation email to activate your subscription." text to
googlebot) and then it went into google index.

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_RPM
I'm not sure what you are trying to explain here.

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chatmasta
This is new behavior from google. Nobody is aware of googlebot _creating
accounts_ and/or logging into websites in order to scrape them.

If this is a new policy, then google set a precedent. Now anybody scraping a
website post-login can claim "google does it too," which is already an
accepted excuse in defense of scraping in general.

