🤖 Overview

piyushbot is a web crawler operated by an individual developer known as Piyush, first documented in a public GitHub repository (github.com/piyush/piyushbot) circa 2021. Its primary purpose is to collect publicly accessible web content for personal research, small-scale data analysis, and testing of custom search engine algorithms. Unlike corporate crawlers, piyushbot is a hobbyist project with limited infrastructure and no commercial product feeding.

🌐 Technical Behavior

The crawler uses a Python-based scraping framework (Scrapy version 2.5) and sends requests at an average rate of 1 request per 5 seconds, as noted in the bot's configuration file hosted on the GitHub repo. It respects standard HTTP/1.1 and supports both GET and HEAD methods, but does not implement HTTP/2. IP ranges are dynamic, typically originating from residential or small VPS providers such as DigitalOcean (143.110.0.0/16) and Linode (45.79.0.0/16), based on observed logs from the project's own test runs. The bot follows a breadth-first crawl strategy with a maximum depth of 3 levels.

📋 robots.txt Compliance

According to the bot's source code (src/middleware/robots.py), piyushbot explicitly parses and honors Disallow directives via the RobotFileParser library, with a 5-second cache for robots.txt files. However, there is no formal documented policy on parallel robots.txt fetching, so aggressive multiple requests may occur.

🔍 Detection Indicators

The User-Agent string is Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; piyushbot/1.0; +https://piyushbot.dev/info) with an optional referral header of https://github.com/piyushbot. Behavioral fingerprint: consistently low request rate (1 request per 5 seconds) and a lack of JavaScript rendering. No official verification mechanism exists.

📊 Data Usage

Collected data is stored locally in SQLite databases for personal research, including NLP experiments and small-scale index building. The bot's documentation states that data is never shared or sold, and is used solely for educational purposes (see README.md in the GitHub repo).

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

Due to its unpredictable IP rotation and lack of official rate-limit manifesto, website operators should apply standard threshold-based blocking (e.g., 50 requests/hour from a single IP) to prevent accidental overload. The bot's low crawl rate means genuine visits are rarely disruptive, but protection ensures site stability.

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