🤖 Overview

The Bumblebee crawler is operated by Bumblebee Search, Inc., a privacy-focused search engine provider, as documented on their official bot page at https://bumblebee.com/bot. Its primary purpose is to index publicly available web content to feed into the Bumblebee search engine, which emphasizes user anonymity and does not track search history.

🌐 Technical Behavior

Bumblebee employs a distributed crawling architecture using a fleet of virtual machines hosted across multiple cloud providers, including AWS and GCP, with IP ranges spanning 45.33.0.0/16 and 104.16.0.0/12 per their published netblocks. The bot makes requests at a rate of approximately 5 requests per second per IP, using HTTP/1.1 keep-alive connections and respecting ETag and Last-Modified headers to avoid redundant downloads. Crawl depth is limited to 10 hops, and it follows canonical URLs as defined by rel="canonical" link tags.

📋 robots.txt Compliance

According to the official Bumblebee crawler documentation at https://bumblebee.com/robots, the bot fully honors Disallow directives in robots.txt and also respects Crawl-Delay directives with a minimum delay of 5 seconds. The bot checks robots.txt at the start of each new domain crawl and re-fetches it every 24 hours.

🔍 Detection Indicators

The primary User-Agent string is Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Bumblebee/2.0; +https://bumblebee.com/bot). Behavioral fingerprints include a constant request interval without randomization and a tendency to request robots.txt before any other page on a new domain. The From header is occasionally set to [email protected], as noted in server logs shared by webmasters.

📊 Data Usage

Collected data is used exclusively to build and update the Bumblebee search index, which provides search results without storing personal user data. The index is refreshed weekly, and page content is stored temporarily for deduplication before being discarded, as outlined in their privacy policy at https://bumblebee.com/privacy.

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

Rate limiting is applied because Bumblebee, while legitimate and well-behaved, can still generate significant load on small websites due to its distributed nature and consistent crawl rate; webmasters are advised to set Crawl-Delay to 10 seconds or higher to reduce resource consumption without blocking the bot entirely.

ⓘ 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.