🤖 Overview

Gigabot is a web crawler operated by Gigablast Inc., the company behind the open-source Gigablast search engine originally created by Matt Wells and first released in 2008. Its sole purpose is to systematically discover and index publicly accessible web pages to populate the Gigablast search index, which is available both as a public search service at gigablast.com and as a freely deployable open-source platform under the GPL license. According to the official Wikipedia entry for Gigablast, the crawler is designed to support a distributed, privacy-focused search engine that competes with larger commercial indexes.

🌐 Technical Behavior

Gigabot issues HTTP GET requests using standard HTTP/1.1 with keep-alive connections and identifies itself with the User-Agent string Gigabot/3.0 or Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Gigabot/3.0; +http://www.gigablast.com/) as documented in the official Gigablast GitHub repository (https://github.com/gigablast/gigablast). It first fetches the robots.txt file, then proceeds with concurrent crawling using multiple threads — typically several simultaneous requests — which makes it notably aggressive. The crawler respects the Crawl-delay directive and will pause between requests if specified. Its IP addresses are not published as a fixed range; they originate from various cloud providers and data centres used by Gigablast, including but not limited to AWS and DigitalOcean. Gigabot primarily parses static HTML and follows links recursively; it does not execute JavaScript by default, though a headless mode may be used for certain dynamic content.

📋 robots.txt Compliance

Gigabot fully honors both Disallow and Crawl-delay directives in robots.txt, as confirmed by the project's official documentation and source code. The GitHub repository includes a test suite that validates robots.txt compliance, and the crawler's manual encourages site owners to set appropriate crawl delays to manage its frequency.

🔍 Detection Indicators

The primary fingerprint is the User-Agent string containing Gigabot — either Gigabot/3.0 or Gigabot/2.0 for older versions. Additionally, Gigabot often includes an HTTP From header with the email address [email protected]. Log entries may show requests from IP ranges that reverse-DNS to gigablast.com or generic cloud provider hostnames; no other static identifying headers are used.

📊 Data Usage

All data collected by Gigabot is used exclusively to build and maintain the Gigablast search index, which provides full-text search results for the public Gigablast engine and for any third-party deployments of the open-source software. Unlike AI training crawlers, Gigabot does not scrape content for large language model training or similar purposes; its data lifecycle ends with indexing and retrieval for search queries.

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

Because Gigabot employs multiple concurrent connections by default and can generate a high volume of requests, site administrators are strongly advised to implement rate-limiting — for example, a threshold of 10 requests per second per IP — to prevent server overload while still allowing the crawler to index the site. This is consistent with standard industry practice for aggressive but legitimate search engine bots.

ⓘ 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.