"Pita" spider

Has anyone seen this one?

[nafmo]

I have a few broken requests in my log from a robot that calls itself "Pita":

 wb1.stanford.edu - - [21/Jun/2003:00:23:57 +0200] "GET /supcon/2001/peter/m& HTTP/1.0" 404 6227 "-" "Pita ([e-mail])"

(The request come from that I have obfuscated my mailto links slightly).

Does anyone know what this is all about? I couldn't find any information about it here or googling for it.

[rbs10025]

It's been a couple years but a bot called Pita running from Stanford absolutely raped a site I was consulting for. Downloaded enough pages in a short enough timespan that even now I can remember the event. I was convinced that its name had nothing to do with food, and would more accurately be labeled "P.I.T.A.".

[jdMorgan]

But then again, there were those posts last month discussing a new "BlockRank" ranking technique from Stanford -- wonder if there's any relation?

Despite the 'bot fetching a few bad links, was it otherwise well-behaved? Did it fetch and obey robots.txt?

Jim

[nafmo]

It did download robots.txt, and seemed to obey to it. It does, however, download a new page every ten second and goes on for several hours at a time, which is a bit annoying. About 10000 page requests spanning over three days in my log now (I have some big mailing list archives, it only downloaded each page once).

It's not too bad, it only request about 70 non-existing pages, most from the incorrect parsing of my obfuscated e-mail URLs (MSNbot did the same thing, so does some other bots, including most spambots thankfully). I was just wondering what it was, since I could not find anything more about it on the web.

[keyplyr]

Pita ([e-mail])

I just thought it was spoofed, but it definitely has shown to be a pain in the @ss.

[jdMorgan]

Well since the IP address resolved to Stanford, I'll send 'em an e-mail if they make a mess in my logs fetching junk files. I've had to write to several 'bot projects about various issues, mostly concerning contact info in the UA, but things like this, too. In most cases, they are glad to hear from us, and several have been very responsive.

Jim