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Do any of you who run blogs ever notice occasional rashes of indexing from 64.41.128.xxx? I’ve noticed this every few days when poking around in the copy of StatPress Reloaded which is running here to monitor pageviews and such.
It turns out that these queries are from Attributor Corporation, who regularly indexes blogs and such to look for copyright violations, duplications of text / image / video content, etc.
Attributor’s FAQ states that…
Attributor is the world’s first web-wide content tracking and analysis platform that enables publishers to build value with their content wherever it appears on the Internet.
With Attributor, publishers can now program when, how and where their content is presented across the web and social networks. Advanced fingerprinting algorithms, a large scale crawling infrastructure and detailed contextual analysis provide publishers with web-wide visibility of their articles, images or videos. Using the Attributor platform, customers can monitor licensed uses, identify new sales leads and revenue-sharing opportunities, and derive more links and better search engine placement.
The FAQ then goes on to talk about how they don’t want to immediately send out DMCA notices for such things, but instead enhance monetization by sending requests to those copying content asking for appropriate links back, attributions, etc. They also claim that their tool (Dashboard) can take Creative Commons licenses into account and help ensure that the license is being followed accordingly.
I don’t really mind, since all this content is fairly original and put out for everyone to see and read, but it is interesting to see the scanning actually happening.
My dad’s site, http://www.michigantaxes.com, was also getting hit by these people
He didn’t like it, so he actually put in a deny entry for their Class C in an apache .htaccess file. They’ll now get 403 errors.
Jason: That works, although I wouldn’t be surprised if they start indexing from other places in the future, possibly with different useragents. It’s interesting to hear that other people are noticing this as well.