Gulper Web Bot

stonybrook.edu

[keyplyr]

UA: Gulper Web Bot 0.2.4 (www.ecsl.cs.sunysb.edu/~maxim/cgi-bin/Link/GulperBot)
Robots.txt: No
Host: Turner Cable ISP, Road Runner BB (private residence)
IP Range: 76.80.0.0 - 76.95.255.255 76.80.0.0/12

Site belongs to CS dept at stonybrook.edu, New York
129.49.0.0 - 129.49.255.255
129.49.0.0/16

Normal header fields (Linux.) Acted as a browser would, getting associated files for two consecutive pages. Maybe just CS student browsing from the web client of a Linux machine at home but flying a bot UA.

Now blocked.

[wilderness]

Could that be the equine college at Morrisville, NY?

If so, they've had a bot for more than a decade.

[keyplyr]

This is the "Experimental Computer Systems Lab" (www.ecsl.cs.sunysb.edu) at Stonybrook University, Brookhaven, New York. As such, I would imagine they write many bots. However, as stated, it looks like this PHD candidate is running this bot from his/her home (residential) cable ISP.

[lucy24]

www.ecsl.cs.sunysb.edu/~maxim/cgi-bin/Link/GulperBot

Could you get this URL to resolve? My browser claims there's no such page, and continues making the same claim until you get all the way back to the host. I don't mean Stonybrook itself (I know that exists, because my father's wife used to teach there), or the Experimental Computer doohickey (front page apparently designed in 1998), I mean the specific pages and directories.

On a whim I searched their alumni list [ecsl.cs.sunysb.edu].* In spite of my initial impression that I would come up cold because it looks overwhelmingly as if you have to be Chinese to attend, I did find a Maxim. But probably not the one we're looking for, since that one moved on to Google long ago.

You could always try a "please identify your robot" email.


* If you enjoy that kind of thing, the HTML should be good for a snicker.

[keyplyr]

I did post the www.ecsl.cs.sunysb.edu as well as the stonybrook.edu addresses. Those were the paths I had to use to get the info.

[iamlost]

There are WebmasterWorld threads on this going back to 2001.

See also [robotstxt.org...]
and [ecsl.cs.sunysb.edu...]

The authors of a 2003 paper (Implementation of a modern web search engine cluster) are Maxim Lifantsev and Tzi-cker Chiueh
Abstract:

Yuntis is a fully-functional prototype of a complete web search engine with features comparable to those available in commercial-grade search engines. In particular, Yuntis supports page quality scoring based on global web linkage graph, extensively exploits text associated with links, computes pages' keywords and lists of similar pages of good quality, and provides a very flexible query language. This paper reports our experiences in the three-year development process of Yuntis, by presenting its design issues, software architecture, implementation details, and performance measurements.

It has shown up pretty much every year somewhere or other which makes me think it is an ongoing teaching resource at Stony Brook as Yuntis never commercially materialised (to my knowledge).

[keyplyr]

makes me think it is an ongoing teaching resource at Stony Brook

As stated:

Site belongs to CS dept at stonybrook.edu, New York

CS = Computer Science, an ongoing course at that university.

[lucy24]

The authors of a 2003 paper (Implementation of a modern web search engine cluster) are Maxim Lifantsev and Tzi-cker Chiueh

That's the one that had me wondering if it's the same Maxim, with a long-abandoned student website living on only in a robot's UA string ;)