🤖 Overview

The crawler kpricorn org bot is operated by the independent research group Kpricorn, a non‑profit organization dedicated to advancing open‑source artificial intelligence research. Its primary purpose is to systematically collect publicly available web content—including text, images, and metadata—to build and refine large‑scale training datasets for machine learning models, particularly in natural language processing and computer vision. The project is hosted at http://kpricorn.org and has been active since early 2022, with its crawler documented in the group’s public repository on GitHub under the kpricorn/crawler project.

🌐 Technical Behavior

The crawler employs a distributed architecture, typically launching between 10 and 50 concurrent requests per second from a pool of IP addresses registered in the ASN 20473 (The Constant Company) and ASN 16509 (Amazon) ranges. It uses HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2 protocols with a default crawl delay of 2 seconds between successive requests to the same domain, though this delay can be overridden by the site’s robots.txt Crawl‑Delay directive. Requests are sent with a randomized user‑agent string containing the bot’s identifier, and the crawler follows only robots.txt‑allowed paths, avoiding links marked with nofollow or noindex meta tags. The bot uses a custom built‑in link queue that respects ETag and Last‑Modified headers to avoid re‑downloading unchanged content.

📋 robots.txt Compliance

Based on the official robots.txt documentation published on the Kpricorn website (https://kpricorn.org/robots), this bot fully honors Disallow directives and will not crawl any path or subdomain explicitly blocked. It also supports the Crawl‑Delay directive and will automatically slow down its request rate to match the specified value. The researchers have stated in their GitHub repository (issue #47) that they manually review and exclude any robots.txt updates within 24 hours of notification.

🔍 Detection Indicators

Requests from this bot include the identifying User‑Agent string: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Kpricorn/1.0; +http://kpricorn.org/crawler). Additionally, the HTTP From header is often set to [email protected], and the Accept‑Language header is fixed to en‑US. The bot does not present a custom X‑Forwarded‑For header but uses a consistent User‑Agent pattern that includes the version number (e.g., Kpricorn/1.2).

📊 Data Usage

All collected data is used exclusively for internal research and academic publication under a permissive open‑access license. The Kpricorn group releases curated subsets of the dataset on platforms like Hugging Face and Zenodo for community use. The raw crawl logs are also shared with partner universities to improve low‑resource language models. No personal or sensitive information is intentionally stored; the dataset undergoes automated redaction of email addresses and phone numbers.

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

This bot is rate‑limited because its distributed architecture can inadvertently generate high request volumes that degrade server performance for other users. A threshold of 50 requests per minute per IP is recommended to ensure fair resource allocation while still allowing the crawler to complete its ethical data collection within a reasonable timeframe.

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