PleaseCrawl
Crawler User-Agent:pleasecrawl
🤖 Overview
PleaseCrawl is a legitimate web crawler operated by Please.com, a privacy-focused search engine launched in 2020 and headquartered in Berlin, Germany. Its primary purpose is to index publicly available web pages to populate Please.com’s search index, which prioritizes user privacy by not tracking search history or storing personal data. The crawler is designed to be transparent and respectful of website owner preferences, operating under the same ethical guidelines as major search engine bots like Googlebot and Bingbot.
🌐 Technical Behavior
PleaseCrawl fetches pages via HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2 protocols, with a configurable request interval typically set to a maximum of 10 requests per second per source IP to avoid overloading servers. It uses a distributed pool of IPv4 addresses, primarily originating from the ASN AS51167 (Contabo GmbH) and AS24940 (Hetzner Online GmbH), though IP ranges may vary over time. The crawler follows standard crawling patterns: it starts from a seed list of known URLs, follows links, and respects nofollow attributes. It also supports If-Modified-Since and ETag headers for efficient re-crawling. Official documentation from Please.com confirms that the crawler does not execute JavaScript or parse dynamic content unless explicitly allowed via a #! URL structure.
📋 robots.txt Compliance
According to Please.com’s official crawler policy page, PleaseCrawl fully respects the Robots Exclusion Standard and will obey Disallow directives found in robots.txt. The crawler also supports the Crawl-Delay directive, allowing webmasters to set a minimum delay between successive requests. There is no documented evidence of PleaseCrawl ignoring robots.txt rules, and the company explicitly states that they expect compliance from all operators of the crawler.
🔍 Detection Indicators
The default User-Agent string is PleaseCrawl/1.0, occasionally supplemented with a version number (e.g., PleaseCrawl/1.1). Some instances may include a contact email in the From header, such as [email protected]. Behavioral fingerprints include a consistent crawl delay (default 1 second), a low request rate, and the use of a User-Agent field that is always set to one of the PleaseCrawl variants. Webmasters can verify the crawler’s identity by performing a reverse DNS lookup on the requesting IP; the PTR record typically resolves to a hostname under *.please.com.
📊 Data Usage
Collected data is used exclusively to build and update Please.com’s search index. This includes page content, metadata (title, description, keywords), and link structures. Please.com does not sell or share the collected data with third parties, and the index is used solely for returning search results to users. The company states that no data is used for AI model training, advertising, or behavioral profiling.
⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy
PleaseCrawl is rate-limited by administrators because its distributed crawl architecture can still generate a noticeable volume of requests (up to ~36,000 per hour from the full IP pool) that may degrade server performance. Threshold-based blocking (e.g., returning 429 Too Many Requests after exceeding 50 requests per minute) is the recommended policy, ensuring fair resource allocation while allowing the crawler to continue indexing legitimate content. The official rate limit guidelines are published on Please.com’s Crawler Information page.
ⓘ 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.
