Announcement: TrueLocal TUCKER 0.1

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; TUCKER/0.1; +http://www.truelocal.com/tucker.aspx)

[bakedjake]

If you are a directory site or brick and mortar store website, you may start to see TUCKER (TrueLocal URL Crawling Knowledge Extraction Resource) crawling your site.
The following user agent will be used:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; TUCKER/0.1; +http://www.truelocal.com/tucker.aspx)

The crawl broker (MotherTUCKER) will recognize and slow crawling for unresponsive or slow websites to prevent overloading of servers.

TUCKER acts a lot like a standard web crawler but is commissioned for different purposes, including:

Storing and analyzing webpages - used to map descriptive keywords to local businesses

Extracting unstructed attribute data related to local search - example: hours of operation

Finding new store locations

Verifying business data against known sources

TUCKER can be intelligent depending on its crawl mode - for example, it does have the ability to recognize and crawl form-based store locators.

To prevent crawling of your site, you may use robots.txt and/or the meta robots tag. TUCKER understands its name; no version is required.

Example robots.txt:

User-agent: tucker
Disallow: /admin

If you see TUCKER becoming unruly, you can sticky me or submit a bug report via the URL above, which should be live in the next couple of weeks.

[volatilegx]

thanks for the info, Jake ;)

[incrediBILL]

Thanks for the advance warning so we can block it ;)

[jdMorgan]

incrediBill's just fooling -- He blocks everything by default. But you might want to ask him to put Tucker on his whitelist... :)

Thanks for the "Press release" -- Now if we can just get all these 'major' search engine projects to keep us informed like this.

Jim