A summary of the DuckDuckGo-Favicons-Bot Internet robot. Including details for the owner, description, HTTP user agent and whether this robot adheres to the robot exclusion standard.
Who owns the DuckDuckGo-Favicons-Bot robot? Is it a good or a bad robot? And why is it visiting your website?
Shown below is a sample log file entry for the DuckDuckGo-Favicons-Bot web robot.It’s derived from an Apache web server log file. From the log entry information about how the robot identifies itself, HTTP User Agent, and where it is hosted are given.
Server Log File
vntweb.co.uk 107.21.1.8 - - [22/Mar/2019:00:06:14 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 10726 "https://www.vntweb.co.uk/" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; DuckDuckGo-Favicons-Bot/1.0; +http://duckduckgo.com)"
HTTP User Agent
DuckDuckGo-Favicons-Bot/1.0
IP Addresses
The observed IP address was 107.21.1.8.
WHOIS DNS command gives the following information about the IP address:
| NetRange: | 107.20.0.0 – 107.23.255.255 |
| NetName: | AMAZON-EC2-8 |
| OrgName: | Amazon.com, Inc. |
| Address: | Amazon Web Services, Inc. |
| Address: | P.O. Box 81226 |
| City: | Seattle |
| StateProv: | WA |
| PostalCode: | 98108-1226 |
| Country: | US |
| Updated: | 2018-09-19 |
As can be seen from the above the observed IP address is a part of a block assigned to Amazon AWS Network Operations.
Owner
DuckDuckGo
Country
USA
Exclusion
The user-agent string includes a reference to the website http://duckduckgo.com.
The referenced website doesn’t provide information about whether the bot supports the robots exclusion text and also obeys the crawl delay.
However, you may wish to use the website details https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckbot as referenced by the web robot DuckDuckBot-https which reference
The DuckDuckGo website provides details about how their robot complies with the robots.txt exclusion standard, which was described at http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/exclusion.html#robotstxt, but is not currently available. Information is available on the same website https://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html and also on the w3c website at https://www.w3.org/TR/html4/appendix/notes.html#h-B.4.1.1
Details are given about both preventing the robot from indexing the website and how to adjust its crawl rate.
Their advice is to include the following entry in the robots.txt file to prevent DuckDuckGo-Favicons-Bot from visiting your site
User-agent: DuckDuckGo-Favicons-Bot Disallow: /
Or maybe try with reference to their main robot
User-agent: DuckDuckBot Disallow: /
Also to control the frequency of DuckDuckGo-Favicons-Bot visiting your site, setting a minimum acceptable delay between consecutive requests can be set with the following added to the robots.txt file:
User-agent: DuckDuckGo-Favicons-Bot Crawl-Delay: 10
Or maybe try with reference to their main robot
User-agent: DuckDuckBot Crawl-Delay: 10
In this example, taken from their website the delay has been set to 10 seconds.
As is common with website crawlers there is a delay between changes made to the robots.txt file and the change being implemented.
Take care making changes to the robots.txt file. A misunderstanding in configuration or an error in configuration can lead to important search engines excluding your website.
Further Info
DuckDuckGo is an Internet search website.
The website claims that they do not store personal information.
Selling a strong personal privacy message the site also says that they don’t track visitors outside of their website. and they respect the status of private browsing mode.
