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Disclaimer: I work on a search engine (findx). I try not to put competitors in a bad light.
Question: Should a web crawler always reveal its true name?
Background: While crawling the web I've found some situations where using a fake user-agent might help. First example is a web site that checks the user-agent in the http-request and returns a "your browser is not supported" - even for robots.txt. Another example is a site that had an explicit whitelist in robots.txt. Strangely, 'curl' was whitelisted but 'wget' was not. I hesitate in using a fake user-agent, e.g. googlebot because it isn't clear what the clueless webmasters' intentions are. It appears that some websites are misconfigured or so google-optimized that other/new search engines may have to resort to faking user-agent.
I'm also puzzled by Qwant because they claim to have their own search index but my personal website (which is clearly indexed when I search in qwant) has never been crawled by a user-agent resembling anything that could lead to qwant. Apparently they don't reveal what their user-agent is: https://blog.qwant.com/qwant-fr/. And there has been some discussion about it: https://www.webmasterworld.com/search_engine_spiders/4743502.htm
This is different from search engines that don't have their own index (eg. DuckDuckGo uses results from Yahoo! and yandex. Startpage uses Google, etc.)
So what do you Soylentils say, is faking the user-agent in webcrawls necessary? Acceptable? A necessary evil?
(Score: 2) by Justin Case on Wednesday July 06 2016, @01:33AM
Sites relying on the User-Agent header need to DIAF.
+1. If your site cares what device or software I'm using, you're doing it wrong and need to be banished to the fiery depths.
robots.txt is equally silly, meaningless, and there only to waste everybody's time with a "standard" that is a joke.
Spider it first with a common User-agent, or even be honest that you're a spider. Obey robots.txt.
Once you have everything you can find that way, hit it again with some lies. Use some throwaway IPs if you can.
If anything changes you've found an idiot. Congratulations. They need to feel some pain. Hit them with everything you've got. Do it for England and the Queen.