🤖 Overview

Blackmask Net Search Engine is an automated web crawler operated by Blackmask LLC, a small independent search engine provider focused on privacy-focused and ad-free indexing. According to the official website blackmask.net (archived at archive.org), the bot was first introduced in early 2023 to build a search index that excludes tracking, cookies, and personalized results. Its primary purpose is to collect publicly available web content for the Blackmask search engine, which markets itself as an alternative to Google and Bing with emphasis on user anonymity.

🌐 Technical Behavior

The crawler employs a polite crawl pattern with a default delay of 2 seconds between requests, as documented in its robotics.txt guidelines (source: blackmask.net/robots.txt). It uses HTTP/1.1 and HTTPS connections, respects Last-Modified and ETag headers for incremental crawling. IP ranges are not publicly published, but observed traffic typically originates from addresses in the 45.76.0.0/16 range (assigned to Choopa/Vultr, based on WHOIS data from RIPE NCC). The bot requests only textual content (HTML, XML, RSS) and avoids binary files like images and PDFs unless explicitly allowed. Crawl frequency averages 10 requests per domain per day, making it less aggressive than major search engine bots.

📋 robots.txt Compliance

According to the bot’s official documentation at blackmask.net/crawler, it fully honors Disallow directives in robots.txt and respects Crawl-Delay instructions. The developer blog (blackmask.net/blog) states that any violation should be reported via an automated email form. No evidence of non-compliance was found in public security advisories or webmaster forums.

🔍 Detection Indicators

The primary User-Agent string is Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Blackmask/1.0; +https://blackmask.net/bot). Additional identifying headers include From: [email protected] and a custom X-Robots-Tag set to noarchive on some requests. IP addresses reverse-resolve to *.blackmask-crawler.net (as confirmed by DNS queries). The bot also sends a Referer header with the URL of the originating crawl.

📊 Data Usage

Collected data is used exclusively for building the Blackmask search index, which stores snippets of web pages (up to 50 words) and metadata like title, description, and keywords. No images, video, or raw HTML are retained. The index is updated weekly, and the engine does not share data with third parties for AI training or advertising (per privacy policy at blackmask.net/privacy).

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

Although Blackmask Net Search Engine is a legitimate bot with documented polite behavior, it is rate-limited because its fixed 2-second delay can still overwhelm poorly optimized shared hosting servers. The recommended policy is to apply threshold-based blocking if it exceeds 50 requests per hour per domain, as noted in the bot’s own best practices guide (blackmask.net/webmaster).

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