- cross-posted to:
- opensource@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- opensource@lemmy.ml
A site similar to 12ft.io but is self hosted and works with websites that 12ft.io doesn’t work with.
How does it work?
It pretends to be GoogleBot (Google’s web crawler) and gets the same content that google will get. Google gets the whole page so that the content of the article can be indexed properly and this takes advantage of that.
Seems like this can be done in the browser using a user agent switcher.
It amazes me that all it takes is just changing user agent to
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
and it can bypass paywalls on many sites? I thought those sites would try harder (e.g. checking if the ip address is truly belong to google), but apparently not.Same. I thought there would be more stuff happening in the background but when I saw it’s just hijacking the google bot headers to display the html i was a bit disappointed it’s so stupidly easy.