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.
Crawlers which do more than 5% of the total (uncompressed) crawling activity are marked in bold below.
| Crawler | Last IP used |
|---|---|
| ia_archiver" "pond.gladstonefamily.net | 54.173.35.129 |
| ia_archiver" "pond1.gladstonefamily.net | 54.173.35.129 |
| masscan/1.0 (https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/masscan)" "- | 31.210.102.114 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Dataprovider.com;)" "www.gladstonefamily.net | 167.114.65.240 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; DeuSu/5.0.2; +https://deusu.de/robot.html)" "blog.gladstonefamily.net | 85.93.91.84 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; DeuSu/5.0.2; +https://deusu.de/robot.html)" "gladstonefamily.net | 85.93.91.84 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; DotBot/1.1; http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/dotbot, help@moz.com)" "blog.gladstonefamily.net | 216.244.66.202 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; DotBot/1.1; http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/dotbot, help@moz.com)" "gladstone.name | 216.244.66.241 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; DotBot/1.1; http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/dotbot, help@moz.com)" "gladstonefamily.net | 216.244.66.242 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; DotBot/1.1; http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/dotbot, help@moz.com)" "pond.gladstonefamily.net | 216.244.66.249 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; DotBot/1.1; http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/dotbot, help@moz.com)" "pond1.gladstonefamily.net | 216.244.66.249 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MJ12bot/v1.4.8; http://mj12bot.com/)" "blog1.gladstonefamily.net | 108.59.8.70 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MJ12bot/v1.4.8; http://mj12bot.com/)" "charon.gladstonefamily.net | 108.59.8.70 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MJ12bot/v1.4.8; http://mj12bot.com/)" "gladstonefamily.net | 162.210.196.130 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MJ12bot/v1.4.8; http://mj12bot.com/)" "www.gladstonefamily.net | 162.210.196.130 |
| Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.6) Gecko/20070725 Firefox/2.0.0.6 - James BOT - WebCrawler http://cognitiveseo.com/bot.html" "pond1.gladstonefamily.net | 144.76.100.237 |
| Python-urllib/2.7" "pond1.gladstonefamily.net | 34.207.212.169 |