🤖 Overview

exactsearch is a web crawler operated by ExactSeek, a small independent search engine based in the United States that provides aggregated search results from multiple sources. The bot’s primary purpose is to index publicly accessible web pages for inclusion in ExactSeek’s search index, which powers its own search results as well as partner sites. According to ExactSeek’s official documentation, the crawler was first deployed in early 2000s and has maintained a consistent operational profile since then.

🌐 Technical Behavior

The exactsearch bot follows standard HTTP/1.1 and HTTPS protocols, sending requests with a default crawl delay of approximately 10 seconds between page fetches, as documented in its user-agent guidelines. It respects the robots.txt directives but does not always adhere to the crawl-delay directive, instead using its own fixed delay. The bot primarily uses IPv4 addresses drawn from a small range registered to ExactSeek, though exact IP blocks are not publicly listed. It does not support HTTP/2 or gzip compression by default, making its requests easy to identify at the network level. The crawler typically visits pages in a breadth-first manner, starting from a seed list of popular sites, and rarely re-crawls pages more than once per week. Its request frequency is moderate, averaging 1-2 requests per second per source IP, which is low compared to major search engines.

📋 robots.txt Compliance

ExactSeek confirms on their website that the exactsearch bot fully honors Disallow directives found in a site’s robots.txt file. It also respects Allow rules when explicitly set. However, the bot does not support the Noindex meta tag and instead relies solely on robots.txt for crawl exclusions. There is no evidence of willful violation of robots.txt, and the operator explicitly states that blocking the bot will not affect search ranking or indexing of the site.

🔍 Detection Indicators

The exactsearch bot identifies itself with the user-agent string Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; exactsearch/1.0; +http://www.exactseek.com/crawler.html) as documented on the ExactSeek bot information page. It also sends a From header containing the email address [email protected] in some implementations. Behavioral fingerprints include a lack of Accept-Encoding support, a static Referer header (often set to the site’s own URL), and a request pattern that avoids weekends and holidays based on operator logs.

📊 Data Usage

Collected data is used exclusively for building and updating ExactSeek’s search index, which provides search results to users of the exactseek.com portal and partner search engines. The bot does not store full page content long-term; rather, it extracts metadata such as title, description, and keywords, and stores only a cached snippet of the page. There is no indication that collected data is used for AI training or any secondary purpose.

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

Although the exactsearch bot is legitimate and follows basic crawling etiquette, its fixed crawl delay (10 seconds) can still be aggressive on high-traffic sites with limited resources. Rate limiting is applied as a defensive measure to preserve server performance and prevent inadvertent overload, with thresholds typically set to block the bot after 50 requests per minute per IP.

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