Adding compression support can be very simple -- if your spider is coded in Perl using LWP::UserAgent, then the
addition of a single line of code will enable compression support.
$ua->default_header('Accept-Encoding' => 'gzip');
and then you need to make sure that you always refer to 'decoded_content' when dealing with the response object.
For other languages, all
you need to do is to add
Accept-encoding: gzipto the HTTP request that you send, and then be prepared to deal with a 'content-encoding: gzip' in the response.
Happily, some of the large spiders do support compression -- the googlebot and Yahoo Slurp do (to name but two). Since I started prodding crawler implementors, a couple have implemented compression (one within hours), and another reported that it was a bug that it didn't work -- which would be fixed shortly.
I typically send an email of the form:
I noticed that your web spider does not support content compression. This is a pity as it causes increased network bandwidth usage on my web server for no good reason. Of course, it also increases your bandwidth consumption, but that isn't my problem!
Adding support for content compression can be very easy depending on the implementation language of your spider. See the page http://www.gladstonefamily.net/cgi-bin/shame.pl for a list of the current spiders that do not support content compression, and more information on how to fix it.
Thanks, Philip
Crawlers which do more than 5% of the total (uncompressed) crawling activity are marked in bold below.
| Crawler | Last IP used |
|---|---|
| envolk/1.7 (+http://www.envolk.com/envolkspiderinfo.html) | 98.173.26.142 |
| Gigabot/3.0 (http://www.gigablast.com/spider.html) | 66.231.188.22 |
| GurujiBot/1.0 (+http://www.guruji.com/en/WebmasterFAQ.html) | 72.20.109.37 |
| ia_archiver (+http://www.alexa.com/site/help/webmasters; crawler@alexa.com) | 72.44.39.21 |
| ia_archiver-web.archive.org | 207.241.229.141 |
| Java/1.6.0_07 | 90.35.212.27 |
| Mozilla/4.0 | 208.115.138.254 |
| Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.00; Windows 98) | 80.218.126.90 |
| Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT) | 67.19.79.218 |
| Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 4.0; obot) | 194.153.113.20 |
| Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0b; Windows NT 6.0) | 58.239.46.142 |
| Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; NaverBot/1.0; http://help.naver.com/delete_main.asp) | 114.111.36.26 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.8.1.14) Gecko/20080404 Firefox/2.0.0.14 | 192.100.116.143 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.12; ips-agent) Gecko/20050922 Fedora/1.0.7-1.1.fc4 Firefox/1.0.7 | 69.58.178.30 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.4) Gecko/20061201 Firefox/2.0.0.4 (Ubuntu-feisty) | 75.70.76.95 |
| msnbot-media/1.0 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm) | 65.55.212.88 |
| psbot/0.1 (+http://www.picsearch.com/bot.html) | 217.212.224.186 |
| Python-urllib/2.5 | 195.46.41.175 |
| Scooter/3.3 | 69.147.79.37 |
| Yeti/1.0 (NHN Corp.; http://help.naver.com/robots/) | 61.247.222.53 |