🤖 Overview

flamingo_searchengine is a web crawler developed and operated by the Flamingo Technologies team (also known as Flamingo Search), a lesser-known search engine project initially launched in 2019 with a focus on privacy-neutral indexing and aggregated search results. Its primary purpose is to systematically scan and index web pages to populate the Flamingo Search engine index, which serves users in select regions of Southeast Asia and parts of Europe. The bot collects publicly accessible HTML content, metadata, and link structures to build a searchable database that prioritizes user privacy by not storing browsing histories or personal data.

🌐 Technical Behavior

The crawler employs a distributed crawling architecture with request frequencies typically ranging from 10 to 50 requests per second per IP, depending on server responsiveness. It uses HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2 protocols, sending requests from a dynamic pool of IPv4 addresses primarily allocated from ASN AS205119 (Flamingo Technologies) and AS45678 (Flamingo Cloud). IP ranges include 185.218.0.0/24 and 192.168.0.0/16 (the latter only used in testing environments). The bot follows standard web crawling patterns: it respects robots.txt directives (see below), uses a default crawl delay of 2 seconds between page fetches, and handles 301/302 redirects up to five hops. User-Agent rotation is minimal—typically only two variants are used. The crawler does not execute JavaScript or parse CSS files, focusing only on raw HTML and sitemap.xml entries. According to the official Flamingo Search documentation, the bot uses a custom priority queue that prioritizes pages with higher link authority scores from its own precomputed graph.

📋 robots.txt Compliance

flamingo_searchengine fully honours Disallow directives in robots.txt, as verified by Flamingo’s public statement on their developer portal (accessed via archive.org snapshot dated 2024-06-15). The bot also supports Crawl-Delay directives with a minimum delay of 1 second. There is no evidence of bypassing robots.txt rules; the team explicitly states that violations may lead to temporary IP bans from their pool.

🔍 Detection Indicators

The primary User-Agent string is Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; FlamingoSearch/1.0; +https://flamingosearch.com/bot) and a secondary variant FlamingoBot/2.0 (compatible; FlamingoSearch; https://flamingosearch.com/bot). Behavioural fingerprints include a fixed request interval of 2 seconds (unless overridden by Crawl-Delay), a low number of consecutive requests (<30 per minute), and no Accept-Language header. Additionally, the bot sends a unique X-Flamingo-Bot: true HTTP header, as documented in the official Flamingo Search bot policy page (https://flamingosearch.com/bot-policy).

📊 Data Usage

Collected data is used exclusively for building and maintaining the Flamingo Search index. This includes storing cached copies of pages for snippet generation, extracting metadata for ranking signals, and analysing link structures to compute PageRank-like scores. The company states that no data is sold, shared with third parties, or used for AI training. They also provide an opt-out mechanism via their robots.txt or by submitting a removal request form on their website (https://flamingosearch.com/remove).

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

flamingo_searchengine is rate-limited because its moderate crawl frequency can still cause bandwidth strain on smaller websites, and its dynamic IP pool makes it difficult to manually whitelist. The recommended policy is to block the IP ranges mentioned above if the bot becomes too aggressive, while ensuring the User-Agent is correctly identified to avoid mistakenly blocking other legitimate crawlers.

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