🤖 Overview

SeekportBot is the web crawler operated by Seekport GmbH, a German search engine company based in Osnabrück. Its primary purpose is to index web pages for Seekport’s own search engine, which provides privacy-focused search results and also powers the search functionality for other German portals. The bot was first documented publicly in 2006 and has been continuously active since, collecting publicly available content to build a European-centric search index.

🌐 Technical Behavior

SeekportBot uses HTTP/1.1 requests with a default crawl interval of 10–30 seconds between pages, but can be configured by site owners via the crawl-delay directive in robots.txt. It originates from IP ranges mainly belonging to Seekport GmbH (ASN 399976) and additional blocks in the 87.118.100.0/23 range. The crawler follows standard HTTP Get requests, respects 304 Not Modified responses, and identifies itself via the User-Agent string: SeekportBot/2.0 (or variations like SeekportBot/1.0). It does not use JavaScript rendering and only fetches static HTML and linked resources.

📋 robots.txt Compliance

Based on official documentation from Seekport’s help page (seekport.net/bot), the bot fully respects robots.txt Disallow directives. It also honors the Crawl-Delay directive to reduce server load. There are no known incidents of intentional violation; any aggressive behavior is typically caused by misconfiguration such as ignoring the delay period in early versions, which was fixed in the 2.0 release.

🔍 Detection Indicators

The primary identifier is the User-Agent string SeekportBot/2.0. Additional fingerprints include a X-Robot-Name: SeekportBot header observed in some requests, and a reverse DNS lookup returning a hostname ending in .crawler.seekport.net. Behavioral fingerprint: the bot always requests Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate and does not send cookies. Log entries typically show a persistent source IP from the 87.118.100.x range.

📊 Data Usage

Collected data is used to build and update the Seekport search engine index, which powers public search results and white-label search for partner websites. The index stores page titles, meta descriptions, text content, and URL structures. No data is used for AI training or sold to third parties; Seekport emphasizes privacy and does not track individual users or store search histories.

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

Even though SeekportBot is legitimate and respects robots.txt, rate limiting is applied because some servers may interpret multiple simultaneous concurrent connections (default 1–2) as aggressive, especially on shared hosting. A policy of threshold-based blocking (e.g., block if >100 requests per minute) is recommended to protect other services without denying legitimate indexing, after verifying the User-Agent and IP range.

ⓘ 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.