🤖 Overview

braintime_search is the web crawling agent operated by Braintime (braintime.com), a privacy-focused search engine that emphasizes no user tracking, no logs, and transparent ranking. According to the official Braintime about page and public robots.txt examples, the bot’s purpose is to discover and index publicly accessible web pages to populate the Braintime search results. Braintime’s business model avoids advertising and behavior-based profiling, positioning it as an alternative to major search engines that aggregate data for commercial use.

🌐 Technical Behavior

The braintime_search crawler follows standard HTTP/1.1 and HTTPS protocols, sending requests with a default interval of several seconds between consecutive requests from the same IP. Public server logs and community reports indicate the bot uses a set of IP ranges that appear to be hosted on cloud infrastructure (likely from providers like DigitalOcean or Hetzner, though Braintime does not publish a definitive IP list). The bot respects Crawl-Delay directives in robots.txt and observes a default delay of 10–15 seconds if none is specified. It typically fetches only the main HTML content (text, metadata) and does not request images, CSS, or JavaScript files by default, keeping its bandwidth footprint modest. The crawler operates on a multi-threaded basis but with a low concurrency limit to avoid overloading origin servers.

📋 robots.txt Compliance

Evidence from multiple site administrators confirms that braintime_search fully honors Disallow directives in robots.txt. The bot checks the file at startup and caches it for the duration of the crawl session. It also adheres to the Allow directive where present. No reports of non-compliance have been documented in forums or security advisories, and Braintime explicitly states on its website that their crawler respects site owners' preferences.

🔍 Detection Indicators

The primary identification string is the User-Agent “braintime_search” (case-sensitive). No additional custom headers are consistently reported. In some logs, the bot appends a version string like “braintime_search/1.0”. The bot does not mimic any other User-Agent and does not spoof its identity. Behavioral fingerprints include a low request rate (typically one request every 10–15 seconds), a preference for root-level pages, and a lack of session cookies or referrer headers.

📊 Data Usage

Data collected by braintime_search is exclusively used to build the Braintime search index. Braintime states that it does not sell or share indexing data with third parties, does not use collected content for AI training (as of publicly available documentation), and discards raw crawled data after indexing. The search results are generated using a combination of link analysis and textual relevance, without user profiling.

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

Despite being legitimate, braintime_search is often rate-limited by site operators because its crawl pattern, though gentle, can still generate noticeable traffic on moderate-to-high-traffic sites over extended periods. The policy rationale for threshold-based blocking is to protect server resources and prevent any crawler from monopolizing bandwidth, even when the bot is well-behaved.

ⓘ 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.