Vol. I · Thu, 22 Oct 2026Open 24 hours · Feeding: continuous · Please do not tap the glassPatrons☕ Keepers' coffee
Plate CCLXXXVI0x357B42BBOBEYED
Kingdom Automata›Phylum HTTP›Order Scanners›Family Unidentified›Species ClueWeb-Crawler
Specimen file · The Feral Pit

ClueWeb-Crawler

Incertae sedis

What is ClueWeb-Crawler?

A self-declared bot that is not in the keepers' catalogue yet. It calls itself “ClueWeb-Crawler”. It is operated by Unknown and identifies itself as ClueWeb-Crawler.

Temperament: unknown. Recently arrived. The keepers are still taking notes.

Operator
Unknown
Conservation status
Respects robots.txt
First seen
21 Oct 2026
Last seen
8 h ago
Visits today
2
This week
4
All time
4
Caught in the trap
Never

Nobody has adopted ClueWeb-Crawler yet. Adopt ClueWeb-Crawler: your name goes on a plaque on this page for a year.

ClueWeb-Crawler's food bowl

the bowl, as bots see it

The bowl is empty.

5 of 5 tokens left today
§ I.

Identification

Its full user-agent string, exactly as it arrives at the gate:

User-Agent
$ ClueWeb-Crawler/1.0 (+https://boston.lti.cs.cmu.edu/CMU-ClueWeb-Crawler/; mailto:cmu-clueweb-crawler@andrew.cmu.edu)

There is no operator to verify against. This name is what software calls itself when nobody gave it one.

Identity check · logged visits, last 30 days
IdentityNothing to check against

No operator stands behind this name, so there is nothing to check its visits against.

§ II.

How to block ClueWeb-Crawler

Add these two lines to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. Well-behaved crawlers read it before they crawl, so the change applies from ClueWeb-Crawler's next visit. Nothing else on your site needs to change.

robots.txt
# Block ClueWeb-Crawler from the whole site
User-agent: ClueWeb-Crawler
Disallow: /

Or let it visit but keep it away from part of the site:

# Let it in, but keep it out of one room
User-agent: ClueWeb-Crawler
Allow: /
Disallow: /members/
§ III.

Observed behaviour

Visits, last 30 dayspeak 2 / day
23 Sept 2026today
Diet · pages most often eaten
/2
/robots.txt2
Visiting hours
00h – 11h12h – 23h

Most active around 00:00. The keepers are asleep. It knows.

robots.txt compliance
100.0%

Requested 0 disallowed pages out of 4 requests. Read robots.txt 2 times.

Trap Room record
Clean

Has never followed the hidden link to /trap/. Either well trained or very lucky.

§ IV.

Where it comes from

Scripts and scanners run from wherever their owners rent a server. These are the networks behind the visits on file:

Networks · 1 on file, last 30 days
Carnegie Mellon University AS9100%
Countries
United States US100%

Networks and countries come from the visitor's IP address, looked up in a local copy of the DB-IP database. The addresses themselves are never stored.

§ V.

Keeper's field notes

22 Oct 202600:21. Arrived without announcement. Consumed / and /robots.txt. Departed.
22 Oct 2026Observed reading robots.txt in full. Complied with every word.
21 Oct 2026First recorded at the gate. Entered in the register as Incertae sedis.
21 Oct 2026Visited 2 times in a single day. Keeper unable to establish why.
§ VI.

Questions site owners ask

Does ClueWeb-Crawler respect robots.txt?

Yes. In 4 requests observed here it has read robots.txt and never fetched a disallowed page.

Will blocking ClueWeb-Crawler hurt my search rankings?

No. Nothing respectable will miss it.

How often does ClueWeb-Crawler visit?

Here, about 1 requests a day over the last week. Visits to your site depend on its size, how often it changes, and how many links point to it.

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