 | |
Type of site | Web crawler |
|---|---|
| Available in | English |
| Owner | Datafiniti, LLC |
| Created by | Shion Deysarkar |
| URL | www |
| Launched | September 2009 |
80legs is a web crawling service that allows its users to create and run web crawls through its software as a service platform.
80legs was created by Computational Crawling, a company in Houston, Texas. The company launched the private beta of 80legs in April 2009 and publicly launched the service at the DEMOfall 09 conference. At the time of its public launch, 80legs offered customized web crawling and scraping services. Later in 2009, it added subscription plans and other product offerings. [1] [2]
80legs is built on top of a distributed grid computing network. [3] [ needs update? ] This grid consists of approximately 50,000 individual computers, distributed across the world, and uses bandwidth monitoring technology to prevent bandwidth cap overages. [4] [ needs update? ]
80legs has been criticised by numerous site owners for its technology effectively acting as a Distributed Denial of Service attack and not obeying robots.txt. [5] [6] [7] As the average webmaster is not aware of the existence of 80legs, blocking access to its crawler can only be done when it is already too late, the server DDoSed, and the guilty party detected after a time-consuming in-depth analysis of the logfiles.
Some rulesets for modsecurity block 80legs from accessing the web server completely, in order to prevent a DDoS.[ citation needed ] As it is a distributed crawler, it is impossible to block this crawler by IP.[ citation needed ]
A Web crawler, sometimes called a spider or spiderbot and often shortened to crawler, is an Internet bot that systematically browses the World Wide Web and that is typically operated by search engines for the purpose of Web indexing.
In computing, a denial-of-service attack is a cyber-attack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host connected to a network. Denial of service is typically accomplished by flooding the targeted machine or resource with superfluous requests in an attempt to overload systems and prevent some or all legitimate requests from being fulfilled. The range of attacks varies widely, spanning from inundating a server with millions of requests to slow its performance, overwhelming a server with a substantial amount of invalid data, to submitting requests with an illegitimate IP address.
robots.txt is the filename used for implementing the Robots Exclusion Protocol, a standard used by websites to indicate to visiting web crawlers and other web robots which portions of the website they are allowed to visit.
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Distributed web crawling is a distributed computing technique whereby Internet search engines employ many computers to index the Internet via web crawling. Such systems may allow for users to voluntarily offer their own computing and bandwidth resources towards crawling web pages. By spreading the load of these tasks across many computers, costs that would otherwise be spent on maintaining large computing clusters are avoided.
Googlebot is the web crawler software used by Google that collects documents from the web to build a searchable index for the Google Search engine. This name is actually used to refer to two different types of web crawlers: a desktop crawler and a mobile crawler.
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A search engine is a software system that provides hyperlinks to web pages and other relevant information on the Web in response to a user's query. The user inputs a query within a web browser or a mobile app, and the search results are often a list of hyperlinks, accompanied by textual summaries and images. Users also have the option of limiting the search to a specific type of results, such as images, videos, or news.
BotSeer was a Web-based information system and search tool used for research on Web robots and trends in Robot Exclusion Protocol deployment and adherence. It was created and designed by Yang Sun, Isaac G. Councill, Ziming Zhuang and C. Lee Giles. BotSeer was in operation from 2007 to 2010, approximately.
The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web founded by the Internet Archive, an American nonprofit organization based in San Francisco, California. Created in 1996 and launched to the public in 2001, it allows users to go "back in time" to see how websites looked in the past. Its founders, Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat, developed the Wayback Machine to provide "universal access to all knowledge" by preserving archived copies of defunct web pages.
eBay v. Bidder's Edge, 100 F. Supp. 2d 1058, was a leading case applying the trespass to chattels doctrine to online activities. In 2000, eBay, an online auction company, successfully used the 'trespass to chattels' theory to obtain a preliminary injunction preventing Bidder's Edge, an auction data aggregator, from using a 'crawler' to gather data from eBay's website. The opinion was a leading case applying 'trespass to chattels' to online activities, although its analysis has been criticized in more recent jurisprudence.
CTERA Networks is a privately held enterprise software company headquartered in New York and Israel. The company has regional offices in the UK, Italy, France, Spain, Germany, and Australia. As of 2021, the company is designated as the leading vendor in distributed cloud file storage by GigaOm.
Cloudflare, Inc. is an American company that provides content delivery network services, cloud cybersecurity, DDoS mitigation, wide area network services, reverse proxies, Domain Name Service, and ICANN-accredited domain registration services. Cloudflare's headquarters are in San Francisco, California. According to W3Techs, Cloudflare is used by more than 19% of the Internet for its web security services, as of 2024.
archive.today is a web archiving website founded in 2012 that saves snapshots on demand, and has support for JavaScript-heavy sites such as Google Maps and X. archive.today records two snapshots: one replicates the original webpage including any functional live links; the other is a screenshot of the page.
A search engine cache is a cache of web pages that shows the page as it was when it was indexed by a web crawler. Cached versions of web pages can be used to view the contents of a page when the live version cannot be reached, has been altered or taken down.