🤖 Overview

SearchNowBot is a web crawler operated by SearchNow, a search engine company that provides a privacy-focused search index at searchnow.net. Announced in 2019, the bot’s primary purpose is to discover and index publicly accessible web pages for SearchNow’s search results, similar in scope to other general-purpose crawlers like Bingbot or DuckDuckBot. According to SearchNow’s official documentation at searchnow.net/bot.html, the bot collects only text content, ignores media files, and does not store personal data.

🌐 Technical Behavior

SearchNowBot performs a breadth‑first crawl from discovered seed URLs, fetching both HTML and XML sitemaps. It sends requests using HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2, with a default crawl rate of one request every two seconds per host, though this can be adjusted via the Crawl‑Delay directive in robots.txt. The bot does not publish fixed IP ranges, but reverse DNS lookups of its requests typically resolve to hostnames under the `crawl.searchnow.net` domain. It uses the Accept‑Encoding header for gzip compression and sends a `From` header containing the bot’s contact email. The crawler respects `If‑Modified‑Since` headers to reduce bandwidth usage.

📋 robots.txt Compliance

SearchNowBot fully respects the Robots Exclusion Protocol, including both Disallow and Crawl‑Delay directives. SearchNow’s bot policy page (searchnow.net/robots) explicitly states that the crawler reads and obeys `robots.txt` before every crawl session. It also supports the `Allow` directive to override disallowed paths. The bot does not ignore `noindex` meta tags or `X‑Robots‑Tag` HTTP headers, making it compliant with standard content owner controls.

🔍 Detection Indicators

The primary User‑Agent string is Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; SearchNowBot/1.0; +http://searchnow.net/bot.html). The bot may also send a secondary string without the Mozilla prefix for older sites. Behavioral fingerprints include a consistent request interval, a `From` header containing `[email protected]`, and no JavaScript execution. Reverse DNS entries for its IPs always end in `.crawl.searchnow.net`, allowing easy identification.

📊 Data Usage

Collected page text is used exclusively to populate SearchNow’s search index, which powers query results at searchnow.net. The company states that no data is used for AI model training, advertising profiling, or sold to third parties. The index is updated periodically via recrawling, and content owners can request expedited removal through SearchNow’s webmaster tools.

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

Although SearchNowBot is legitimate and generally polite, it is rate‑limited because its sustained crawling under high concurrency can still momentarily impact server resources. A threshold‑based blocking policy—e.g., returning 429 or 503 after a certain number of requests per second—is applied to prevent resource exhaustion while still allowing the bot to index the site when load permits, following standard industry practices for fair usage.

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