🤖 Overview

The Amerla Search Bot is a web crawler operated by Amerla B.V., a Dutch company that maintains the search engine at amerla.com. Its purpose is to build an independent, privacy-focused search index as an alternative to major search engines. The bot first appeared in 2016 and has since expanded its crawling footprint primarily across European sites.

🌐 Technical Behavior

The crawler sends HTTP GET requests using a custom Python-based client, typically at one request per second by default but respecting any Crawl-Delay in robots.txt. It operates from IPv4 addresses in the 185.255.0.0/16 range (historically observed), announced under Amerla’s autonomous system. It supports HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2, includes Accept-Encoding: gzip, and uses If-Modified-Since headers for conditional requests to save bandwidth. The bot follows up to three redirect hops, indexes only static HTML, and does not execute JavaScript.

📋 robots.txt Compliance

Per the official policy at amerla.com/bot.html, the Amerla Search Bot fully adheres to the Robots Exclusion Protocol. It obeys Disallow and Allow directives, respects Crawl-Delay, and also honors noindex meta tags on individual pages, providing webmasters multiple opt-out methods.

🔍 Detection Indicators

The primary User-Agent string is "AmerlaSearchBot/1.0 (compatible; +https://www.amerla.com/bot)". Occasionally it appears as "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; AmerlaSearchBot/1.0)". IPs typically resolve to hostnames like crawler-*.amerla.com in reverse DNS. Some requests include a custom X-Crawler: AmerlaSearchBot header.

📊 Data Usage

Collected content — page text, metadata, and links — is stored in servers located in the Netherlands and used exclusively for search indexing. Amerla explicitly states that data is not employed for AI training or advertising; its sole purpose is generating relevant search results for amerla.com users, as noted in their privacy policy.

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

Although legitimate and polite, the bot’s sustained crawling rate can burden small servers. Therefore, rate-limiting (e.g., 200 requests per minute per IP) with threshold-based blocking is recommended to prevent resource monopolization while still allowing indexing.

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