tineye
Bot User-Agent:tineye
🤖 Overview
TinEye is a reverse image search engine operated by Idée Inc., a Canadian company founded in 2005 by Leila Boujnane, Mike Dalesandro, and David Termansen. Its primary purpose is to crawl the public web for images, building an index of over 66 billion images (as of 2024) to enable users to find the original source, track image usage, and identify modified versions. TinEye is also used by commercial clients for brand protection and copyright monitoring. Unlike general web crawlers, TinEye focuses exclusively on image content and does not index textual pages beyond the metadata needed to locate images.
🌐 Technical Behavior
TinEye’s crawler, internally named TinEye Robot, systematically traverses websites by following hyperlinks and sitemaps to discover image files (JPEG, PNG, GIF, WebP, and others). It typically respects standard HTTP request intervals but can be aggressive when crawling large sites, sending requests in rapid bursts. The crawler maintains a persistent HTTP/1.1 connection and uses a configurable delay between requests, which is often set to 1–2 seconds per host. According to TinEye’s official documentation (tineye.com/faq), the crawler identifies itself via the User-Agent string “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; TinEye)”, but also appends the version number (e.g., “TinEye/1.1”). IP ranges are registered to Idée Inc. and primarily originate from AWS and Google Cloud data centers in North America and Europe. TinEye does not execute JavaScript and only fetches image URLs found in HTML tags or links, as well as CSS
📋 robots.txt Compliance
TinEye is documented to fully comply with the robots.txt standard (RFC 9309). According to its official robots.txt policy page (tineye.com/robots), the crawler reads and obeys Disallow and Allow directives, including wildcard patterns. It does not crawl pages or images blocked by robots.txt, and it respects the Crawl-Delay directive. Independent tests and customer reports confirm that TinEye halts crawling immediately upon encountering a Disallow rule, and it re-checks robots.txt on subsequent visits to respect changes.
🔍 Detection Indicators
The primary User-Agent string is TinEye/1.1 (http://tineye.com/robot.html), with a secondary fallback of “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; TinEye)”. Behavioral fingerprints include rapid sequential requests to image files only (no HTML body downloads beyond the initial page), absence of form submissions, and no cookie handling. The crawler does not send a Referer header by default, though it may include a custom “X-TinEye-Request: 1” header in certain versions. Web server logs show a characteristic pattern of HEAD or GET requests for image resource URLs immediately following the discovery page request. The crawler’s IP addresses are listed in public DNSBL lists for search crawlers (e.g., spfbl.net) and can be cross-referenced against TinEye’s published IP ranges at tineye.com/ip.
📊 Data Usage
All images discovered by the TinEye crawler are stored in a proprietary fingerprint database based on a robust hashing algorithm (pHash) that is resilient to resizing, cropping, and color adjustments. The database is used exclusively for TinEye’s reverse image search service — allowing users to find exact matches and near-duplicates — as well as for commercial brand monitoring clients who pay for API access. No image data is used for AI training or re-sold to third parties. TinEye explicitly states in its privacy policy (tineye.com/privacy) that it does not use collected images for any purpose beyond search indexing and that users can opt out by adding a Disallow in robots.txt.
⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy
TinEye is rate-limited because its high request density can overwhelm smaller web servers and degrade performance for human users. The policy rationale for threshold-based blocking is to ensure equitable resource use: site owners are encouraged to set a Crawl-Delay directive in robots.txt to a value (e.g., 10 seconds) that matches their server capacity, and if the crawler exceeds that limit, a 429 Too Many Requests response triggers TinEye to back off exponentially.
Similar Threats
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