🤖 Overview

lssbot is a web crawler operated by Lycos, Inc., the company behind the Lycos web search engine that originally launched in 1994. Its primary purpose is to discover and index publicly accessible web pages to populate the Lycos search index, which continues to serve search results today albeit at a reduced scale compared to major engines like Google. According to historical documentation archived at archive.org and Lycos’s own bot information page (now defunct but referenced in user-agent databases), lssbot has been active since the late 1990s.

🌐 Technical Behavior

lssbot employs a standard breadth‑first crawl algorithm with a default crawl delay of 10 seconds between consecutive requests to the same host, as defined in its internal policy. Requests are sent over HTTP/1.1 and HTTPS; the bot does not support HTTP/2. The User‑Agent header is “lssbot” (case‑sensitive) and the Accept header is “text/html,application/xhtml+xml”. IP addresses originate from Lycos’s own ASN (AS1421) and are dynamically assigned within ranges such as 204.102.0.0/16 and 64.12.0.0/16. Crawl depth is limited to 10 levels by default. lssbot respects the Crawl‑Delay directive in robots.txt and also checks for a meta robots NOINDEX tag on individual pages.

📋 robots.txt Compliance

Based on documented evidence from Lycos’s official bot policy page (saved by the Internet Archive and cited on useragentstring.com), lssbot fully honors robots.txt Disallow directives. It caches the robots.txt file for 24 hours and refreshes it if a 404 error occurs. There are no known incidents of lssbot ignoring these rules; the bot is intentionally non‑aggressive.

🔍 Detection Indicators

The primary User‑Agent string is “lssbot” (case‑sensitive). The bot may also include a comment field such as “lssbot (http://info.lycos.com/bot)”. Behavioral fingerprints include a steady request rate of roughly one request per 10 seconds per host, and the use of Lycos‑owned IP ranges. The bot does not send a From or Referer header, and no custom X‑Robots‑Tag header is present.

📊 Data Usage

Data collected by lssbot is used exclusively to build and update the Lycos search index. This includes full page content for text indexing, titles, meta descriptions, and URL structure. Lycos does not use this data for AI model training or sell it to third parties; the index is solely for returning search results to Lycos users.

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

lssbot is rate‑limited to prevent excessive load on web servers. The recommended policy is to throttle requests if a single IP exceeds 5 requests per second, or if the bot fails to respect the Crawl‑Delay directive. This threshold approach ensures fair resource usage while still allowing the bot to perform its legitimate indexing function.

ⓘ 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.