Saturday, November 18, 2006

Stealing T-H-U-N-D-E-R-S-T-O-N-E's Thunder

Here's another LayeredTech scraper busted for your amusement.

They call themselves a search engine and a web crawler, but when I can't find any information that ties the crawler back to the source without jumping through extraordinary means, such as feeding them bread crumbs to chase through the internet, I call them scrapers.

Here's the scraper or web crawler as they call it:

72.232.181.210 "Mozilla/2.0 (compatible; T-H-U-N-D-E-R-S-T-O-N-E)"
Here's where the scrapings end up:
http://www.buyersindex.com/
Apparently this thing is probably the Webinator by Thunderstone Software but it's hard to tell as the user agent has no link to any crawler information and a quick casual review of either website turned up nothing about the crawler.

It's not exactly like they're hiding or anything but it isn't completely above board either by not divulging who's crawling and why.


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