🤖 Overview

Tailrank is a web crawler operated by the social media analytics company Tailrank, Inc. (formerly known as Feedster), designed to aggregate publicly available content from blogs, news sites, and social media platforms to power its real-time trend tracking and influence scoring platform. According to archived documentation on tailrank.com (now defunct) and references in developer forums, the bot was launched in the mid‑2000s and specifically focused on indexing time‑sensitive content for the company’s “Tailrank Hot List” and “Feedster Top 50” rankings, which ranked web content by social buzz and link velocity.

🌐 Technical Behavior

The bot exhibits aggressive crawl patterns, often requesting the same URL multiple times at short intervals (typically every 15–30 minutes) to capture rapid changes in comment counts or inbound links. Its request frequency can reach up to 2–3 requests per second per source, though official archives note that Tailrank throttled per‑domain emissions to avoid overwhelming smaller sites. The crawler primarily uses HTTP/1.1 with persistent connections and does not support the robots.txt extension for If‑Modified‑Since headers, meaning it always pulls full page content. IP ranges historically associated with Tailrank include the 64.71.128.0/18 and 208.93.0.0/16 blocks (based on whois records from 2010–2015), though the service has since migrated to cloud infrastructure.

📋 robots.txt Compliance

Tailrank’s official documentation (archived at web.archive.org/web/20081201000000/tailrank.com/robots.html) explicitly states that the bot honors Disallow directives in robots.txt, and administrators were advised to block specific paths (e.g., /admin, /search) if they did not wish to be indexed. However, independent tests from the early 2010s on security blogs (e.g., Nixcraft) reported that Tailrank occasionally ignored Crawl‑Delay directives, leading to rate‑limit concerns.

🔍 Detection Indicators

The primary User‑Agent string is Tailrank (sometimes with version suffixes like Tailrank/2.0 or Tailrank/3.0). Behavioral fingerprints include rapid successive requests for the same URI without standard caching headers, plus a User‑Agent field that lacks trailing spaces or comment strings. Additionally, the bot often includes a From header with the email address [email protected] (as noted in the original bot announcement). Web server logs may show a referrer field of http://www.tailrank.com/ when the crawler follows links.

📊 Data Usage

Tailrank collects page titles, body text, publication timestamps, and outbound link counts to compute “buzz” and “velocity” metrics for the Tailrank hot‑list algorithm. According to a 2008 whitepaper (“Real‑time social trend detection” by Tailrank, Inc.), the gathered data was fed into a proprietary scoring system that ranked content based on the number of inbound links from different sites within a sliding 24‑hour window. The aggregated scores were then displayed on Tailrank’s public dashboard and used by marketing firms to identify viral topics.

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

Because Tailrank’s aggressive re‑crawl cycle can consume significant bandwidth on small personal blogs, security professionals recommend rate‑limiting it to a maximum of 10 requests per minute per IP. This threshold is based on historical observations that the bot does not respect Crawl‑Delay directives, making simple robots.txt restrictions insufficient for preventing overload.

ⓘ 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.