EtaoSpider

EtaoSpider is a web crawler that appears to be connected to eTao, a price comparison and shopping search engine in China, though its operator has not been officially confirmed. The crawler uses a minimalist user-agent string, EtaoSpider, which lacks the detailed information and documentation links provided by more transparent bots. This lack of transparency makes it difficult to verify its precise operational parameters and objectives.

EtaoSpider most likely visits websites to collect product information, pricing, and other commercial data for a comparison shopping service. If your site is involved in e-commerce or features product listings, it is a likely target. The frequency of its visits is probably determined by the relevance of your site to its data collection needs and how often your product information is updated. It appears to be particularly interested in commercial content from sites serving Asian markets. Given the lack of official documentation, it is difficult to confirm if its crawling is fully authorized or adheres to standard crawler ethics.

The assumed purpose of EtaoSpider is to support a price comparison and shopping aggregation platform by collecting product data from various e-commerce sites. This information would allow the platform's users to compare products and prices across different online retailers. For e-commerce website owners, being included in such a service could potentially increase product visibility, especially in Chinese shopping search results. However, the lack of transparency regarding how the collected data is used raises valid concerns about competitive intelligence gathering and server resource consumption.

To prevent EtaoSpider from accessing your website, you can add a disallow rule for it in your robots.txt file. This is the standard method for managing web crawler access.

Add the following lines to your robots.txt file to block EtaoSpider:

User-agent: EtaoSpider
Disallow: /