GazoPabot & HTMLParser

Dual-hit bots

[dstiles]

I've been getting these for a few days, always to the same site and always in pairs, one or two seconds apart, on the same IP. They both get a 403.

IP: 205.140.208.nn (Hitachi America - Savvis sub-let)

UA 1: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; GazoPabot/1.0; +http://www. gazopa. com/gazopa_bot)

UA 2: HTMLParser/1.6

Robots: Claims to obey but not obviously reading it unless it's remembered from an earlier scan.

Domain is registered to and bot owned by Hitachi America.

Very aggressive - won't take 403 for an answer. One spate ran just under 50 double hits (twice for each UA) in 2 hours 10 mins. Other runs before and after that one of various periods and hits.

The bot has an info page:

"GazoPabot is GazoPa's web image indexing robot. The GazoPabot crawler collects images from the Web to build a searchable index for search services using the GazoPa."

It apparently allows users to match their image to others online. Probably a reasonable bot if you like that kind of thing and it actually obeys robots.txt.

[blend27]

"GazoPa"

How on earth people come up with simply funny naming conventions like this is a mystery to me. I mean seriously, whole bunch of execs from Hitachi America get together in 13 floor conference room for a meeting and decide: OK GazoPa sounds cool!?

[Pfui]

It's memorable. Coolness comes later depending on brand strategy/marketing/advertising/PR.

It might also be a foreign word, or a blend of words, etc. E.g., about Hitachi, founded in Japan in 1910:

"HITACHI" is formed by two Chinese characters: "hi" meaning "sun" and "tachi" meaning "rise". The two words together symbolize the dauntless man standing before the rising sun, planning a better future for all.
-About Hitachi, Ltd. [hitachi-hk.com.hk]

I bet other, now-familiar product/service names were met with, "Huh-wha?" in meetings, too. Like, oh -- Google, Bing, iPod, Blackberry, JELL-O, Kleenex, Xerox, Chevrolet, Twitter, Wii ...

: )