Scooter

what's it doing?

[RobBroekhuis]

Yesterday I saw for the first time a new bot, named "scooter". Just grabbed a few pages, no big deal. Today it's back, with odd behavior. An excerpt from my log:

xx.xx.xx.xx. Scooter/3.3
01:46:31:GET /robots.txt (48 bytes)
01:46:31:GET /portrait.php?plantid=45&p=Aurinia+saxatilis&type=jpeg&no=9&tt=39 (6618 bytes)

It's polite enough to get robots.txt, then it gets a page whose full url is /portrait.php?plantid=45. It made up the rest of the querystring, the first part of which (p=Aurina+saxatilis) refers to the title of my page "Aurinia saxatilis". Is this an attempt at mischief?

[ncw164x]

scooter is the little guy from altavista, the search engine which ruled the world only a couple of years ago.

It's not been out and about that much since he was put into exile pending extinction only to be revived when yahoo purchased altavista, don't know what it's up to but it's certainly leaving a mess in server log files.

ncw164x