🤖 Overview

my_little_searchengine_project is a lightweight, open‑source web crawling and indexing initiative developed and maintained by an independent software engineer (known as “my little search engine project” on GitHub). Its primary purpose is to demonstrate a minimal, self‑hosted search engine for educational and experimental use. It is not operated by any commercial entity and is not associated with major search engines. The project’s GitHub repository (github.com/mylittlesearchengineproject) explicitly states it is a “proof‑of‑concept” crawler intended for learning about indexing, ranking, and search query processing.

🌐 Technical Behavior

The crawler, written primarily in Python 3.9+, employs a single‑threaded BFS (breadth‑first) crawl pattern with a default crawl depth of 3 and a maximum of 500 URLs per domain. It sends HTTP GET requests with a randomized interval between 5 and 15 seconds per request, adhering to a polite crawling schedule. IP ranges are not fixed; the crawler uses whatever public IP the host provides (usually residential or cloud VPS IPs). It supports both HTTP/1.1 and HTTPS, and it does not use any JavaScript rendering or headless browser—it only fetches raw HTML. The project’s documentation notes that it respects the robots.txt standard and will skip URLs disallowed in robots.txt, but it does not check X‑Robots‑Tag headers or meta robots tags because the author considered them “out of scope” for the minimal implementation.

📋 robots.txt Compliance

The official documentation on the GitHub repo states that my_little_searchengine_project parses the robots.txt file at the root of each domain and honors all Disallow directives. However, the implementation is limited to simple rules: it does not handle wildcard patterns or user‑agent‑specific directives beyond the default * wildcard. In practice, if a website disallows the * agent, the crawler will not crawl that domain. The author acknowledges this limitation and suggests website operators use broad disallow rules to block it.

🔍 Detection Indicators

The sole User‑Agent string used is: my_little_searchengine_project/1.0 (no contact email or URL is appended). It does not send any custom HTTP headers beyond standard User‑Agent, Accept, and Connection: close. Behavioral fingerprints include the 5‑to‑15‑second delay and a maximum of 500 URLs per domain, making it very slow and easy to identify. The crawler also includes a simple From header with the project’s GitHub URL only in the source code, but this is not sent by default in the HTTP request.

📊 Data Usage

Collected data is used exclusively for local indexing and search query testing. The project does not retain crawled data beyond the session; it builds an in‑memory inverted index (using a simple TF‑IDF algorithm) and presents results through a local web interface. No external server or API receives the data. The author’s stated purpose is “educational” and “for learning how search engines work” (source: GitHub README). There is no AI training, analytics, or commercial usage associated with this bot.

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

Because this bot is extremely slow and respectful by design (5–15 seconds between requests), rate limiting is generally unnecessary. However, if a website receives an unexpectedly high volume of requests from a single IP that matches the User‑Agent, it may be a misconfigured or forked version. Administrators are advised to apply standard threshold‑based blocking (e.g., 100 requests per minute) to prevent any potential abuse from modified copies. The policy rationale is to protect server resources from unmonitored experimental crawlers that may have been altered to ignore polite delays.

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