A summary of the GumGum 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 GumGum 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 GumGum 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 3.82.243.128 - - [29/Mar/2019:11:44:40 +0000] "GET /wp-content/uploads/2014/11/list-large-tables-host-sql-page-run-script.png HTTP/1.1" 301 386 "-" "GumGum Bot (http://gumgum.com; support@gumgum.com)"
HTTP User Agent
GumGum Bot
IP Addresses
The observed IP address was 3.82.243.128.
WHOIS DNS command gives the following information about the IP address:
| NetRange: | 3.0.0.0 – 3.127.255.255 |
| NetRange: | AT-88-Z |
| OrgName: | Amazon Technologies Inc. |
| Address: | 410 Terry Ave N. |
| City: | Seattle |
| PostalCode: | 98109 |
| StateProv: | WA |
| Country: | US |
| Updated: | 2017-01-28 |
As can be seen from the above the observed IP address is a part of a block assigned to Amazon Technologies Inc.
Owner
GumGum Inc.
Country
USA
Exclusion
The user-agent string includes a reference to the website http://gumgum.com.
The referenced website confirms that the bot supports the robots exclusion text and also obeys the crawl delay.
The GumGum 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 GumGum from visiting your site
User-agent: GumGum Disallow: /
Also to control the frequency of GumGum 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: GumGum 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
Gumgum is an applied computer vision company. By teaching machines to see their aim is to help the media industry.
Their website highlights three areas where their developed technology is used:
- Advertising – providing inline contextual marketing messages.
- Sports – helping rights owners to understand the full media value of their sponsorship investments
- Brand safety – detect unsafe text and imagery to ensure that ads are placed in the correct environment.
