rico/0.1

[PandaM]

I found this bot crawling on my site
it come from 216.250.136.154
does anyone know what it is?

[jdMorgan]

PandaM,

Welcome to WebmasterWorld!

I haven't seen that one, and tracing it through ARIN wasn't very conclusive.

Anybody else?

Jim

[TheSadmaster]

I too have had one of my sites spidered recently, (17.09.03), by something identifying itself as 'rico/0.1' from IP address 216.250.136.154. The site in question is very new and can only have been found from a link on www.geocities.com or members.tripod.com. I suspect that this particular spider might be being used by someone building either a blog or webring specific search engine, but this is just a hunch.

A traceroute on the IP only goes as far as 216.250.136.70, a slightly out-of-date looking hosting company in Utah. Is 'Rico' a common name in Utah?

Cheers,

Mat.

[PandaM]

but my site is quite old, and in a good ranking

[TheSadmaster]

Have you registered your site with any Webrings? The only site that currently links to mine is 'Webringtastic'. I don't think it's anything malicious.

[PandaM]

never. it only has link from my other sites
and never found it on other sites

[jdMorgan]

PandaM,

rico/0.1 showed up here today. As shown below in the server log snippet, it requested "/" and was redirected based on its unrecognized UA. It followed the redirect, but did not request any of the on-page objects (.gif and .jpg images or .js scripts) from the page. It also did not show the initial URL requested as the referer for the second request. It simply went away after these two requests.

Therefore, it is very unlikely that this is a human surfer using a regular browser with a modified UA.

dnvr53.dslgw2poolb1.dnvr.uswest.net - - [22/Oct/2002:16:51:19 -0400] "GET /?Chk_UA HTTP/1.1" 200 42841 "-" "rico/0.1"
dnvr53.dslgw2poolb1.dnvr.uswest.net - - [22/Oct/2002:16:51:13 -0400] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 302 221 "-" "rico/0.1"

Sadmaster,
"rico" is not very likely to be a "common name" in Utah, but it does mean "rich" in Spanish.

Jim

[carfac]

Hi:

I have lived in SLC for 10 years... never met a Rico. But I do not know everyone here, yet.

I am getting rico from 67.40.154.54, which resolves to US West... may be the one Jim is getting.

dave

[wilderness]

Anybody find anything valid on this?
I tried a search at google,
"rico -puerto -act"
and still had nearly 800k in hits. Went through some 15 pages with no luck :-(

There not really taking any quanity of pages. Just curious

[hermit]

I was curious, too. Found this thread while searching for rico/0.1. (actually my first message here)

Itīs just guessing, but Iīm quite shure itīs a crawler from Applied Semantics building up a webdirectory for QWestDex Direct (dotcomdirectory.com).

Applied Semantics has an interesting technology that needs just a few lines of text in order to relate the text to a certain category. (That explains why they just spider 1 or 2 pages per site). They mention QWestDex as case study
("... how QwestDex Direct used Applied Semantics Auto-Categorizer to prepare 2.3 million records for sale without training sets by returning categorization information in days instead of weeks ...")

I have nothing to do with these companies, but I think it will be interesting to see their results if they may come up with a webcatalog of a major part of the web.

I couldnīt reach dotcomdirectory.com, but the last traceroute-hop before timeout was quite the same ip as the one from rico/0.1

Actually, my approach was very straight forward, I just typed in "www.rico.com" ;)
and got one of those "still working" pages, but the pixel.gifs had an absolute path to Applied Semantics ...

[wilderness]

Thanks for the reply and effort hermit.

Welcome to Webmaster World

I'm going to add them to my deny list based on the Applied Semantics site information.
As mentioned and discussed previously, I'm against commercial bots use of non-profit resources. Which is apparently their sole goal :-(

I looked at their customers and most are of the domain reg type.
Major portions of Qwest I've had denied for some time. The Applied Semantics association with QWest only prods me more towards denial of access.

Thanks again.