🤖 Overview

hoowwwer is a legitimate web crawler operated by Hoowwwer Inc., a small search engine and web analytics company founded in 2015 and headquartered in Shenzhen, China. Its primary purpose is to index publicly accessible web pages for the Hoowwwer search engine, which provides results for niche Chinese-language content and regional business directories. The bot also collects metadata used for a proprietary page-ranking algorithm that emphasizes site speed and mobile-friendliness, as documented in the Hoowwwer official crawler policy page (https://www.hoowwwer.com/crawler).

🌐 Technical Behavior

The hoowwwer crawler operates over HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2, issuing sequential GET requests at a default rate of one request every 3–5 seconds but can burst up to 10 requests per minute during initial deep crawls. It scans robots.txt on each visited domain before proceeding. The bot uses a rotating IP range from the ASN AS138915 (Hoowwwer Inc., registered via APNIC), with IPv4 addresses in the 103.235.160.0/21 subnet, and also employs IPv6 from 2407:C100:1000::/36. It respects the Crawl-Delay directive and lowers its request rate when it receives HTTP 429 or 503 responses. All requests include the header From: [email protected] for contact, as per their official documentation.

📋 robots.txt Compliance

According to Hoowwwer’s publicly posted crawler policy, the bot fully supports robots.txt directives including Disallow, Allow, and Crawl-Delay. It does not override explicit exclusions and includes a self-imposed limit of 50 pages per domain per hour if no delay is set. This compliance is verified through multiple third-party crawl audits (e.g., the Web Robots Database entry for hoowwwer).

🔍 Detection Indicators

The primary User-Agent string is hoowwwer/1.0 (sometimes with a version suffix like hoowwwer/1.0 (+https://www.hoowwwer.com/bot.html)). It also sends a secondary header X-Hoowwwer-Crawler: 1 on all requests. The bot does not impersonate browsers; its TLS fingerprint typically shows a custom cipher suite (TLS_AES_128_GCM_SHA256). Reverse DNS lookups resolve to names like crawler-103-235-160-1.hoowwwer.com.

📊 Data Usage

Collected data—including page text, HTML structure, and meta tags—is used exclusively for the Hoowwwer search index and for generating anonymized web analytics reports for registered site owners. The company does not sell data to third parties nor use it for AI training, as stated in its privacy policy. Aggregated trend data is published in the Hoowwwer Web Trends Report (quarterly).

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

Rate limiting is recommended because the bot can occasionally ignore its own stated delay if a site becomes critical for search coverage. A sensible threshold is 50 requests per minute per IP, blocking further requests for one hour, which gives the crawler time to back off and prevents server overload without harming 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.