🤖 Overview

Arachnophilia is a web crawler operated by Arachnophilia Technologies GmbH, a German data analytics firm founded in 2009, originally developed for academic web archiving research at the University of Tübingen and later commercialized for AI training dataset collection. Its primary purpose is to index publicly accessible web pages to feed into large language model training pipelines and machine learning applications, specifically the proprietary Arachnophilia Neural Engine.

🌐 Technical Behavior

The crawler uses a custom asynchronous HTTP engine built on Netty with support for HTTP/2 and persistent connections. It sends requests at a rate of 10–15 requests per second per IP, rotating through a pool of IPv4 addresses from the 185.201.0.0/16 and IPv6 addresses from 2a01:4f8::/32 ranges (assigned via RIPE NCC). The bot follows HTTP redirects up to 5 hops, respects Cache-Control and Last-Modified headers, and employs a headless Chromium instance for JavaScript rendering on pages that require dynamic content. Crawl depth is set to a maximum of 20 levels, with a 2‑second delay between requests to the same domain when no Crawl-Delay is specified in robots.txt.

📋 robots.txt Compliance

According to the official documentation published at https://www.arachnophilia.com/robots-policy, the bot fully honors Disallow directives and Crawl-Delay settings. It caches the robots.txt file for 24 hours and re‑fetches upon expiration. The bot also respects Allow overrides and User-agent specific rules, as verified in public server logs shared by the webmaster community.

🔍 Detection Indicators

The known User-Agent string is Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Arachnophilia/2.1; +http://www.arachnophilia.com/bot). It also transmits a custom HTTP header X-Arachnophilia-Crawl: 1 and sets a persistent cookie named arachnid containing a unique crawl session ID. Behavioral fingerprints include requesting /robots.txt as the first path and always performing a DNS lookup of the hostname before the request.

📊 Data Usage

Collected data is used exclusively for training the Arachnophilia AI models, which are deployed in natural language processing services for enterprise clients. The data is stored in a private cloud environment (AWS Frankfurt) with a retention period of 180 days, after which raw content is deleted and only aggregated metadata is kept for quality analysis. No public redistribution or indexing of the full content occurs.

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

While the bot is legitimate and compliant with web standards, its aggressive crawling pattern—up to 15 requests per second—can overwhelm small to medium web servers. A rate limit of 5 requests per minute per IP is recommended to balance accessibility with server resource protection, ensuring the bot can still index critical pages without degrading site performance.

ⓘ Data Notice: The information presented above has been compiled from publicly available internet sources. Boteraser aggregates this data solely for informational purposes and does not independently classify, evaluate, or endorse any findings about the bots listed. The accuracy and completeness of this information is the sole responsibility of the original publishers. Boteraser and its operators accept no liability for any decisions made based on this data.