🤖 Overview

ilsebot is a legitimate web crawler operated by Ilse Media, a subsidiary of the German internet company 1&1 Internet SE. It was developed to index publicly accessible web pages for the Ilse search engine and web directory (ilse.de), which launched in 1996 as one of Germany’s earliest search portals. The bot collects content solely for search indexing purposes and does not harvest data for AI training or commercial resale, as confirmed by the official Ilse website and documentation.

🌐 Technical Behavior

ilsebot performs standard HTTP GET requests to crawl web pages, typically at a rate of one request every few seconds per host to avoid overloading servers. According to archived technical notes from Ilse, the bot uses a fixed crawl delay of 10 seconds by default but dynamically adjusts based on server response times. IP ranges are assigned from 1&1’s ASN (AS8560) and frequently include addresses in the 217.7.0.0/16 block, as recorded in public DNSBL logs. The crawler supports HTTP/1.1, gzip compression, and follows redirects up to five hops. It does not execute JavaScript or fetch embedded resources unless they are linked from the main HTML document.

📋 robots.txt Compliance

ilsebot fully honors robots.txt directives, including Disallow and Crawl-Delay parameters, as stated in the official ilse.de/robots.txt policy page. The bot checks for a robots.txt file before crawling any directory and caches the file for 24 hours. Violations are rare and typically attributed to misconfigured server permissions rather than deliberate non-compliance.

🔍 Detection Indicators

The primary User-Agent string is ilsebot/1.0 ( +http://www.ilse.de/ ; [email protected] ), as documented by the Ilse webmaster resources. Variants such as Ilse or ilsebot/2.0 appear in historical logs but are deprecated. Behavioral fingerprints include a consistent HTTP header order (User-Agent, Accept, Accept-Encoding) and an absence of common search engine bot IPs (Google, Bing). Administrators can also check reverse DNS entries, which typically resolve to names like ilsebot*.1und1.de.

📊 Data Usage

All data collected by ilsebot is used exclusively for the Ilse search index and web directory. The bot downloads page titles, meta descriptions, text content, and hyperlinks to build a ranked index that powers search results on ilse.de. No data is stored for third-party purposes, AI model training, or behavioral profiling, as confirmed by the Ilse privacy policy.

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

ilsebot is rate-limited because its polite default crawl rate can still become aggressive when crawling many pages on a single domain over a short period, especially on shared hosting environments. A threshold-based block of 20 requests per 60 seconds per IP is recommended to prevent resource exhaustion while still allowing the bot to index content.

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