A summary of the DuckDuckBot-Https Internet robot. Including details for the owner, description, HTTP user agent and whether this robot adheres to the robot exclusion standard.
Who owns the DuckDuckBot-Https 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 DuckDuckBot-Https 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 23.21.227.69 - - [21/Mar/2019:11:47:52 +0000] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 301 315 "http://www.mitarbeiterangebote.de/" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; DuckDuckBot-Https/1.1; https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckbot)"
HTTP User Agent
DuckDuckBot-Https/1.1
IP Addresses
The observed IP address was 23.21.227.69.
WHOIS DNS command gives the following information about the IP address:
| NetRange: | 23.20.0.0 – 23.23.255.255 |
| NetName: | AMAZON-EC2-USEAST-10 |
| OrgName: | Amazon.com, Inc. |
| Address: | Amazon Web Services, Inc. |
| Address: | P.O. Box 81226 |
| City: | Seattle |
| StateProv: | WA |
| 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 Web Services.
Owner
DuckDuckGo
Country
USA
Exclusion
The user-agent string includes a reference to the website https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckbot.
The referenced website confirms that the bot supports the robots exclusion text and also obeys the crawl delay. It also provides the IP addresses from which the bot originates.
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
However, details are not given about preventing the robot from indexing the website or how to adjust its crawl rate.
If you wish to prevent DuckDuckBot-Https from visiting your site you may wish to try the following
User-agent: DuckDuckBot-Https Disallow: /
Also to trial controlling the frequency of DuckDuckBot-Https visiting your site, setting a minimum acceptable delay between consecutive requests add the following to robots.txt file:
User-agent: DuckDuckBot-Https Crawl-Delay: 10
In this example 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.
