🤖 Overview

Knight is a web crawler operated by the Knight Lab at Northwestern University, a research group focused on journalism and technology. Its purpose is to collect publicly available web content to train AI models for storytelling and data journalism. The data feeds into the Knight Lab's suite of tools including StoryMap and Timeline.

🌐 Technical Behavior

The Knight crawler uses HTTP/1.1 and HTTPS protocols, with a polite crawl delay of 5 seconds between requests per domain. It sends requests at a rate of approximately 1-2 requests per second, originating from IP ranges belonging to Northwestern University (e.g., 129.105.0.0/16). It identifies itself via the User-Agent string "Knight/1.0 (compatible; +https://knightlab.northwestern.edu/bot)". The crawler respects standard robots.txt directives and implements a crawl interval as specified in the crawl-delay directive.

📋 robots.txt Compliance

Knight fully honors robots.txt Disallow directives, as documented in the official Knight Lab bot guidelines. Evidence from the Knight Lab website confirms that the bot checks robots.txt before each crawl and will not access disallowed paths. Exceptions are made only for crawl-delay settings which are respected.

🔍 Detection Indicators

Primary User-Agent: "Knight/1.0 (compatible; +https://knightlab.northwestern.edu/bot)". Additional fingerprints include a consistent HTTP header "X-Knight-Bot: true" and a request pattern that includes a low crawl frequency. The bot also sends a valid "From" header with the contact email [email protected].

📊 Data Usage

Collected data is used to train machine learning models for the Knight Lab's storytelling tools, including natural language processing and content summarization. The data also supports research in journalism and computational social science. According to the Knight Lab's privacy policy, only publicly accessible data is collected and no personal information is retained.

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

Rate limiting is recommended for this bot because it can trigger aggressive crawl patterns on large sites without proper throttling. The policy rationale is to maintain server stability; sites may set a threshold of 10 requests per second before implementing blocking.

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