our preference is always to find out why the block is happening and try to convince people it should be otherwise; widespread abuse of robots.txt does no-one any good, having been crawling and indexing for so long it's a standard that we understand and are quite fond of
we can see some of the perils and pitfalls of it too, but web builders need to be given some tools and assurances that those tools will work for them
IP already hits a wall, also better to not get a reputation as a bad bot, it's taken a while to get known for being friendly and respecting rules, to us you should follow robots
We make money from our API, what they're referencing is a beta ads programme which was running
Agree to disagree here, but I'll refer to Cory Doctorow for a contextual vs behavioral/tracking ads comparison, one which is very good: https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/05/behavioral-v-contextual/#contextual-ads (applied to the media, but the general thread is relevant)
which language are we talking?
not sure what's happening there for you, speed is one of the things which people frequently say we do well for
qwant is bing, mainly
we make money mainly from our api, our investors are patient private capital and we don't take vc, appreciate your point but these are fundamentally different situations, our ads (when they run) will also be contextual so more of a ddg situation than a "makes users into products to be sold to advertisers"
fair enough if it's not for you though
The Express? There's definitely a not-reading-it option
forks of firefox still keeping things going such as mullvad browser, waterfox, librewolf
probably a sample size issue, we crawl and index everything we are able to; have seen many of this kind of site in the past, and finding them is something that other people have said they enjoy about mojeek