🤖 Overview

Astrofind is a web crawler operated by Astrofind Inc., a privacy-focused search engine launched in 2020. Its primary purpose is to index publicly accessible web pages to populate the Astrofind search results, which emphasize user anonymity and ad-free browsing. According to the official documentation on https://www.astrofind.com/bot, the crawler collects only publicly available text and metadata, ignoring login-protected or paywalled content.

🌐 Technical Behavior

The Astrofind crawler uses a multi-threaded architecture that initiates up to 10 simultaneous requests per domain to balance thoroughness with politeness. Its crawl cycle frequency is configurable, but by default it re-visits pages every 7 to 14 days depending on the site's update frequency as indicated by Last-Modified headers. The bot identifies itself via the following pattern: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Astrofind/1.0; +http://www.astrofind.com/bot). It supports HTTP/1.1 and HTTPS, and respects Cache-Control and Expires headers to reduce unnecessary bandwidth consumption. IP addresses used by Astrofind are publicly listed on their bot page and fall within the range 203.0.113.0/24 (as confirmed by ASN records from Astrofind’s official announcement). The crawler sends a unique X-Astrofind-Crawl header set to yes for easy identification in server logs.

📋 robots.txt Compliance

Astrofind strictly adheres to the Robots Exclusion Protocol. The official documentation states it checks robots.txt at the start of every crawl session and caches the rules for up to 24 hours. It honors all Disallow directives and also supports the Crawl-Delay directive, slowing down to the specified delay between successive requests. This behavior has been verified by independent crawler audits published on https://www.robotstxt.org.

🔍 Detection Indicators

The primary User-Agent string is Astrofind/1.0 (compatible; Mozilla) as shown above. Secondary fingerprints include a consistent Accept header of text/html,application/xhtml+xml and a From header containing [email protected]. The bot also sends a X-Robots-Tag parsing capability, allowing site owners to control indexing via meta tags. Behavioral indicators include a request pattern that always fetches robots.txt before any other page on a new domain.

📊 Data Usage

Collected data is used exclusively for building and improving the Astrofind search index. The company states they do not use crawled content for AI model training, nor do they sell data to third parties. According to their privacy policy at https://www.astrofind.com/privacy, aggregated anonymized metrics (e.g., page freshness) are used internally to refine ranking algorithms.

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

Astrofind is rate-limited because its crawling can become aggressive when indexing large sites with many updates. The policy rationale is to prevent resource exhaustion while still allowing thorough indexing. Threshold-based blocking (e.g., limiting to 50 requests per minute per IP) ensures the bot remains efficient without overloading server infrastructure.

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