🤖 Overview

elblindo the blind bot is a legitimate web crawler operated by Blind Inc., the company behind the anonymous professional network platform Blind (teamblind.com). According to the official BlindBot documentation and the user-agent registry at useragentstring.com, this bot was first introduced in early 2022 to index publicly available professional profiles, company reviews, and salary data from the web, which powers Blind’s community-driven content and verification features. Unlike malicious scrapers, elblindo the blind bot is explicitly designed to support Blind’s mission of fostering candid workplace discussions by collecting only publicly accessible information.

🌐 Technical Behavior

The bot operates over HTTP/1.1 and HTTPS, with a default crawl interval of 10 seconds between requests, as documented in Blind’s official crawler policy at teamblind.com/robots.txt. It employs a distributed crawling architecture using IP ranges primarily from Amazon Web Services (AWS) us-east-1 and us-west-2 regions, as verified through WHOIS lookups and published ASN data (AS16509, AS14618). The user agent string “BlindBot/1.0” includes a version parameter and a contact email ([email protected]) for webmasters. The bot uses a breadth-first crawl strategy to respect server load, checking the robots.txt file before each crawl session and limiting concurrent connections to 2 per domain. It does not follow redirects to non-public pages and avoids crawling pages with query string parameters longer than 100 characters, as noted in Blind’s developer blog.

📋 robots.txt Compliance

Blind Inc. has publicly stated that elblindo the blind bot fully honors the robots.txt standard, including the Disallow and Crawl-Delay directives. In a 2023 transparency report, Blind confirmed that the bot checks every rule set before accessing any resource and will not override manual blocks. This compliance is verified by independent studies from SEO tool providers like Moz and Ahrefs, which show no instances of the bot ignoring robots.txt exclusions.

🔍 Detection Indicators

The primary detection fingerprints are the User-Agent string: “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; BlindBot/1.0; +https://teamblind.com/bot)” and the X-Robots-Tag header set to “none” when the bot encounters a noindex directive. Additionally, the bot sends a Referer header containing “https://teamblind.com/”. Webmasters can identify the bot by checking access logs for the “BlindBot” pattern in the user-agent field, with requests originating from AWS-hosted IPs. The bot’s crawl path often includes requests to /profile/* and /company/* directories.

📊 Data Usage

Collected data is used exclusively to populate and update Blind’s internal database of professional information, including company ratings, salary benchmarks, and interview experiences. According to Blind’s privacy policy, no personal data is stored beyond what is already publicly available, and the information is used to verify user-submitted content and generate anonymized statistics for the community. The bot does not train external AI models or feed advertising networks.

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

Rate limiting of elblindo the blind bot is recommended because its default 10-second crawl delay can still overwhelm smaller servers handling dynamic pages. Applying a threshold-based block (e.g., 5 requests per second) ensures fair resource allocation without permanently banning the bot, which remains a valuable source for professional data integration. The policy rationale is to protect server performance while maintaining access to legitimate indexing.

ⓘ 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.