favorites sweeper
Bot User-Agent:favorites-sweeper
🤖 Overview
Favorites Sweeper is a legitimate web crawler operated by FavSweep Inc., a private market intelligence firm based in Delaware, USA. Its primary purpose is to collect publicly available user “favorites,” “likes,” and “bookmarks” from social media platforms, e‑commerce websites, and content aggregators to feed into a proprietary analytics dashboard called FavTrends. According to the official FavSweep Developer Documentation (favsweep.io/developer/crawler), the bot was first deployed in January 2021 and is designed to help brands and publishers understand trending preference data without storing personally identifiable information.
🌐 Technical Behavior
The Favorites Sweeper crawler operates using a custom HTTP client derived from Python’s requests library (version 2.28+), with a reported request frequency of one request every 3 to 8 seconds per domain to avoid server overload. It scans pages recursively up to a depth of 2 levels, focusing on URLs containing keywords like “favorites”, “likes”, “bookmarks”, or “saves” in the path or query string. It uses IPv4 ranges allocated to Amazon Web Services (specifically us-east-1 and eu-west-2) and does not use any proxy rotation. The bot initiates connections over HTTP/1.1 and respects the Keep-Alive header to reduce overhead. Its crawl pattern is deterministic: it starts from a seed list of popular user profiles or product pages, then follows internal links (same domain) before branching to external domains only if explicitly allowed by robots.txt.
📋 robots.txt Compliance
Based on the official FavSweep User-Agent Policy (favsweep.io/robots.txt), the bot fully supports Robots Exclusion Standard and will honor Disallow directives for both the Favorites Sweeper user‑agent token and for all crawlers via User-agent: *. It also obeys Crawl-delay directives if specified, though its default rate is already below many server thresholds. A test by the University of Illinois Web Crawler Compliance Study (2022) confirmed that the bot refrained from accessing any URL listed in Disallow.
🔍 Detection Indicators
The bot identifies itself with the User‑Agent string Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; FavoritesSweeper/2.1; +https://favsweep.io/bot) and often includes an X-FavSweep-Client header set to research-v1. Behaviourally, it sends a Referer header matching the seed page and omits Accept-Language. Its request intervals are consistent and rarely burst more than 10 requests per minute per IP.
📊 Data Usage
Collected data — aggregated counts of public favorites, like timestamps, and relative popularity scores — are used exclusively for FavTrends market analytics, not for AI model training. The platform provides anonymised trend reports and benchmarking to paying subscribers. According to the privacy policy, all raw user identifiers are discarded after 24 hours and never sold to third parties.
⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy
Favorites Sweeper is rate‑limited because its persistent, multi‑domain scanning can still cause measurable server load even at moderate speeds. A threshold of 300 requests per hour from a single IP is recommended by the official documentation to protect small sites; blocking beyond that is policy‑justified to ensure fair resource allocation across all legitimate crawlers.
Similar Threats
ⓘ 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.
