🤖 Overview

Seekport is a web crawler operated by the German search engine company Seekport GmbH, based in Elmshorn, Germany. First launched in the early 2000s, the bot is designed to index web pages for the Seekport search engine, which provides search results primarily for the German-language market and European users. Unlike major global search engines, Seekport positions itself as a privacy-focused alternative, with the bot collecting publicly available content to populate its own search index without selling user data. The crawler is considered a legitimate search engine agent and is not associated with any malicious activity.

🌐 Technical Behavior

Seekport performs standard HTTP/HTTPS requests with a moderate crawl frequency, typically respecting robots.txt directives. According to official documentation from Seekport, the bot identifies itself via the User-Agent string "SeekportBot" and also uses "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; SeekportBot/1.0; +http://www.seekport.com/bot.html)". The crawler operates from a range of IP addresses allocated to Seekport GmbH, which are documented in public WHOIS records and include subnets such as 195.49.168.0/22 and 89.146.64.0/21. The bot follows a breadth-first crawl strategy, fetching robots.txt first, then requesting pages in a sequential manner with a delay of several seconds between requests. It supports protocols HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2, and includes an Accept-Language header of de-DE,de;q=0.9 to prioritize German-language content. The bot does not execute JavaScript or render pages — it only retrieves static HTML and linked resources like CSS and images.

📋 robots.txt Compliance

According to Seekport’s own documentation and verified through independent testing, Seekport fully honors robots.txt directives, including Disallow rules, Crawl-delay parameters, and Allow overrides. The bot checks the robots.txt file before each crawl session and will not access disallowed paths. Administrators can block the bot entirely by adding User-agent: SeekportBot Disallow: /. This compliance is explicitly stated on Seekport’s official bot information page at http://www.seekport.com/bot.html.

🔍 Detection Indicators

The primary User-Agent string for Seekport is "SeekportBot" or the full version "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; SeekportBot/1.0; +http://www.seekport.com/bot.html)". Behavioral fingerprints include sequential request patterns with a fixed delay of 2–5 seconds, a lack of Accept-Encoding headers for gzip in some older versions, and the presence of an Accept-Language: de-DE header. The bot does not send cookies or session identifiers. Reverse DNS lookups on its IPs typically resolve to *.seekport.de or *.seekport.com. Webmasters can also identify it via the user-agent token in server logs — the hostname often ends with seekport.de.

📊 Data Usage

The data collected by Seekport is used exclusively to build and update the Seekport search engine’s index. The engine provides organic search results for web pages, news, images, and videos, with a focus on privacy and data protection under GDPR standards. Unlike larger search engines, Seekport does not use crawled data for AI training, advertising profiling, or analytics — it solely serves the purpose of returning relevant search results to end users. The company claims that no personal data is stored or shared from crawled content.

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

Seekport is rate-limited because its moderate crawl frequency can still generate significant load on smaller websites, especially when multiple crawlers request pages concurrently. The policy recommends threshold-based blocking if the bot exceeds 10 requests per second or consumes excessive bandwidth, though it will automatically back off when encountering 429 Too Many Requests responses, as documented in its official developer guidelines.

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