FreeFind.com viral marketing

banned at the firewall

[Finder]

208.201.244.129 - - [09/Dec/2002:22:16:49 -0500] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 440 "http://freefind.com" "FreeFind.com-SiteSearchEngine/1.0
(http://freefind.com; [e-mail])"

I am assuming this is a viral marketing campaign. It's annoying to find this entry in my log file every day. If this is a legitimate spider they can just as easily put the info on the web instead of asking you to give them your email address. Their IP has now been added to my ban list.

[pendanticist]

Greetings Finder,

Not sure what you mean by:

viral marketing campaign

but (and I can't think of the specific term I saw referenced to this before), it's kinda like they spam you by requesting your page, so that when one views their log files they may, just may, go to that website and hook up with the site search options they have.

Pendanticist.

[edit] Log Spamming [/edit]

[wilderness]

Finder,
Did you haappen to install a free Site Meter on your site with Java code on each page?
Do the bot come like clock work every Monday?
[sitemeter.com...]

If so? It's your own doing.

BTW I've been using their free service for three+ years.
It is quite good. And offers a site search as well as What's new. A vareity of set up options.
The only thing I don't care for is their sitemap.

[richlowe]

Freefind is a LOCAL site search engine. You sign up and tell it about your site, and it creates an index and allows your visitors to search. YOu can set it up to do remote indexing, and perhaps someone has done that to you.

Richard Lowe

[jdMorgan]

I got a single hit from them too, and like Finder, suspect it's just a viral marketing campaign. They did not index the site, just fetched "/".

Jim

[bull]

Additionally, the bot does not fetch robots.txt

bull

[WitchLars]

Same here:

Single hit, "/" only, no robots.txt, and I've never touched sitemeter.com.

Looks like a case of log spamming to me as well.

-Lars

[jimh009]

I use freefind.com for my site search. Once a week (every Sunday night) it comes around like clock work (you schedule it) and they spider the entire site - if you want it.

It works very well. It grabs every page just like Google does and the search results are also quite good.

Before signing up for their free search services, I never say freefind.com in my logs before, so not sure why it would be visiting your site if you don't have any of their services.

Jim

[wilderness]

Jimh,
As I mentioned earlier I've been using the service for 3+ years. It remains quite useful and reliable. In the beginning before following my logs I even used their traffic logs which are more reliable.

I have however received a single off-day hit since this thread began.

It should be noted that the Freefind bot for a month or two was coming from a different (at least from normal) IP than in all the previous years. They have recently resumed the old IP.
Perhaps therein lies the problem?
or
Perhaps as in many other things on the interent viability becomes a determination of remaining and the operators are analyzing different venues?

[jdzgeek]

Hi All,

If you are seeing our spider coming from ip address 208.201.244.129 you are seeing one of our development spiders.

This morning I received an anonymous (and irate) email from a webmaster indicating that this spider was not fetching robots.txt prior to site access. I am tracking down this issue right now (it is related to scaling-up our site spider to handle very large datasets, such as the web).

Eventually we hope to use this new spider to include your websites on our <redacted>.net property.

Jim D
FreeFind