Alex Rivera | Logout

Detecting honest web crawlers

Asked 2009-02-13T01:55:33.483
46

I would like to detect (on the server side) which requests are from bots. I don't care about malicious bots at this point, just the ones that are playing nice. I've seen a few approaches that mostly involve matching the user agent string against keywords like 'bot'. But that seems awkward, incomplete, and unmaintainable. So does anyone have any more solid approaches? If not, do you have any resources you use to keep up to date with all the friendly user agents?

If you're curious: I'm not trying to do anything against any search engine policy. We have a section of the site where a user is randomly presented with one of several slightly different versions of a page. However if a web crawler is detected, we'd always give them the same version so that the index is consistent.

Also I'm using Java, but I would imagine the approach would be similar for any server-side technology.

c# web-crawler bots
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You said matching the user agent on ‘bot’ may be awkward, but we’ve found it to be a pretty good match. Our studies have shown that it will cover about 98% of the hits you receive. We also haven’t come across any false positive matches yet either. If you want to raise this up to 99.9% you can include a few other well-known matches such as ‘crawler’, ‘baiduspider’, ‘ia_archiver’, ‘curl’ etc. We’ve tested this on our production systems over millions of hits.

Here are a few c# solutions for you:

1) Simplest

Is the fastest when processing a miss. i.e. traffic from a non-bot – a normal user. Catches 99+% of crawlers.

bool iscrawler = Regex.IsMatch(Request.UserAgent, @"bot|crawler|baiduspider|80legs|ia_archiver|voyager|curl|wget|yahoo! slurp|mediapartners-google", RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);

2) Medium

Is the fastest when processing a hit. i.e. traffic from a bot. Pretty fast for misses too. Catches close to 100% of crawlers. Matches ‘bot’, ‘crawler’, ‘spider’ upfront. You can add to it any other known crawlers.

List<string> Crawlers3 = new List<string>()
{
    "bot","crawler","spider","80legs","baidu","yahoo! slurp","ia_archiver","mediapartners-google",
    "lwp-trivial","nederland.zoek","ahoy","anthill","appie","arale","araneo","ariadne",            
    "atn_worldwide","atomz","bjaaland","ukonline","calif","combine","cosmos","cusco",
    "cyberspyder","digger","grabber","downloadexpress","ecollector","ebiness","esculapio",
    "esther","felix ide","hamahakki","kit-fireball","fouineur","freecrawl","desertrealm",
    "gcreep","golem","griffon","gromit","gulliver","gulper","whowhere","havindex","hotwired",
    "htdig","ingrid","informant","inspectorwww","iron33","teoma","ask jeeves","jeeves",
    "image.kapsi.net","kdd-explorer","label-grabber","larbin","linkidator","linkwalker",
    "lockon","marvin","mattie","mediafox","merzscope","nec-meshexplorer","udmsearch","moget",
answered 2013-01-26T10:27:55.743

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