customising user-agent string?

[elbolton]

Is there any way of altering the user-agent string in the logs of indexed websites?

[David]

The user agent string is hard coded to "ZoomSpider- wrensoft.com" in V5.0 of the software. We are considering making it a configurable option in the V5.1 Enterprise edition. But as we have only just released V5.0. It will be a while before V5.1 is available.

[elbolton]

thank you very much for your reply - good to know it is being considered. Will await 5.1 with anticipation.

keep up the good work

[David]

ZSEBOT - Zoom Search Engine Spider

V5.1 of Zoom has now been released (15/June/2007). Users of the Enterprise Edition of Zoom can modify the User-Agent text that is used to identify the spider when it crawls web servers. This can be done from the advanced tab in the Zoom configuration window.

By default, the spider identifies itself as
"ZoomSpider - wrensoft.com [ZSEBOT]"

If you specify a name in the user agent text field, e.g. "MySearchEngine.com", your spider will then identify itself as
"MySearchEngine.com [ZSEBOT]".

This allows you to include your website name or other contact information, should you wish to allow third-party websites to identify you, or be able to contact you if required. It can also be helpful if you wish to add specialized behaviour to your website, so that, for example, you could allow your personal spider exclusive access to certain pages on your site, and prohibit access for any other user-agents.