Why does Amazonbot even exist, can someone explain? I don't understand why an ecommerce play would be crawling other websites.

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input_sh 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

To train AI. Not even a hyperbole, that is the only concrete example they list in their explanation: https://developer.amazon.com/amazonbot

> Amazonbot is used to improve our products and services. This helps us provide more accurate information to customers and may be used to train Amazon AI models.

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tintor 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

To ensure Amazon marketplace sellers aren't offering lower prices on other ecommerce websites. Also AI.

	▲	b112 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I was wondering about this. And it makes me think this is all mistruth, unless they plan to drop this pricing tactic. They've been getting some heat on it lately, but I find it hard to believe they're going to give up entirely? And if so, what's to stop someone from just flouting their rules on pricing, and then doing the robots.txt thing to prevent issues?

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embedding-shape 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Amazonbot is specifically the user agent they use for crawling for "provide more accurate information to customers" (whatever that means, could be anything it sounds like) and also when they scrape for data used in AI training, according to https://developer.amazon.com/amazonbot

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reaperducer 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

AI. Gotta slurp the world.