Yahoo! in my Blackhole
Okay, I realize that the title sounds a bit odd, but nowhere near as odd as my recent discovery of Slurp ignoring explicit robots.txt rules and digging around in my highly specialized bot trap, which I have lovingly dubbed “the blackhole”. What is up with that, Yahoo!? — does your Slurp spider obey robots.txt directives or not? I have never seen Google crawling around that side of town, neither has MSN nor even Ask ventured into the forbidden realms. Has anyone else experienced such unexpected behavior from one the four major search engines? Hmmm.. let’s dig a little further..
Here is the carefully formulated, highly specific, properly placed robots.txt rule that explicitly and strictly forbids all agents from accessing my blackhole spider trap for bad bots:
User-agent: *
Disallow: */blackhole/*Nothing unusual here. This is standard stuff, right? But wait, what about that crazy wildcard character? Does Yahoo! acknowledge such a creature? Sure they do (404 link removed). So what’s up, then? I surely don’t know. This is such unexpected behavior from such a popular, highly visible search engine. Thus, let’s make sure that we are actually dealing with ol’ Slurp, and not some nasty impostor. To do this, we’ll follow Yahoo’s own advice and perform a forward-reverse IP lookup for verification. Here are the results:
Reverse lookup for IP: 74.6.26.167
lj511353.crawl.yahoo.netOrgName: Inktomi Corporation
OrgID: INKT
Address: 701 First Ave
City: Sunnyvale
StateProv: CA
PostalCode: 94089
Country: US
NetRange: 74.6.0.0 - 74.6.255.255
CIDR: 74.6.0.0/16
NetName: INKTOMI-BLK-6
NetHandle: NET-74-6-0-0-1
Parent: NET-74-0-0-0-0
NetType: Direct Allocation
NameServer: NS1.YAHOO.COM
NameServer: NS2.YAHOO.COM
NameServer: NS3.YAHOO.COM
NameServer: NS4.YAHOO.COM
NameServer: NS5.YAHOO.COM
Comment:
RegDate: 2006-02-13
Updated: 2007-03-09
RAbuseHandle: NETWO857-ARIN
RAbuseName: Network Abuse
RAbusePhone: +1-408-349-3300
RAbuseEmail: network-abuse@cc.yahoo-inc.com
.
.
.Forward lookup for hostname: lj511353.crawl.yahoo.net
74.6.26.167Yup, apparently, all checks out — it was Yahoo’s machine alright. Tsk, tsk — naughty Slurp! Even worse, this is not the first time Slurp has been caught sniffing around where it should not be sniffing. Needless to say, I will definitely be keeping a close eye on Yahoo! from now on.
Finally, just for the record, here is the log entry for the blackhole event to which this article refers:
IP Address: 74.6.26.167
Date/Time: 2007-11-21 (Wed) 20:52:37
URI Request: GET /blackhole/ HTTP/1.0
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)
OrgName: Inktomi Corporation
OrgID: INKT
Address: 701 First Ave
City: Sunnyvale
StateProv: CA
PostalCode: 94089
Country: US
NetRange: 74.6.0.0 - 74.6.255.255
CIDR: 74.6.0.0/16
NetName: INKTOMI-BLK-6
NetHandle: NET-74-6-0-0-1
Parent: NET-74-0-0-0-0
NetType: Direct Allocation
NameServer: NS1.YAHOO.COM
NameServer: NS2.YAHOO.COM
NameServer: NS3.YAHOO.COM
NameServer: NS4.YAHOO.COM
NameServer: NS5.YAHOO.COM
Comment:
RegDate: 2006-02-13
Updated: 2007-03-09
RAbuseHandle: NETWO857-ARIN
RAbuseName: Network Abuse
RAbusePhone: +1-408-349-3300
RAbuseEmail: network-abuse@cc.yahoo-inc.com
OrgAbuseHandle: NETWO857-ARIN
OrgAbuseName: Network Abuse
OrgAbusePhone: +1-408-349-3300
OrgAbuseEmail: network-abuse@cc.yahoo-inc.com
OrgTechHandle: NA258-ARIN
OrgTechName: Netblock Admin
OrgTechPhone: +1-408-349-3300
OrgTechEmail: netblockadmin@yahoo-inc.com
# ARIN WHOIS database, last updated 2007-11-20 19:10
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