A lot of people seem to be wondering who exactly is behind the radianrss identifier that some of us have been seeing in our webserver logs or FeedBurner statistics1. Google doesn’t give much information on this topic, so a little detective work gave me the following bits of information:
- It seems all requests originate from 142.166.3.122 or 142.166.3.123. A traceroute on this IP only tells me it’s on a block owned by New Brunswick, Canada’s Stentor National Integrated Communications Network. Information on this company is scarce and seems to be coming from third-party sources, the first page of Google having failed to provide a link to an official website. I didn’t pursue this further.
- 142.166.3.122 presents a Flash-based login screen when accessed via Firefox. However, the browser’s status bar gives a very helpful hint: Read login.radian6.com. So we know have a name to go by. Indeed, login.radian6.com resolves to that IP2
- Going to the radian6 website tells us the rest of the story, and frankly it seems to make sense. A company
focused on building the complete monitoring and analysis solution for PR and advertising professionals so they can be the experts in social media.3
So they crawl blogs and index what everybody is saying about some company or another. Not the first, not the last to do so, but just another indication that more and more people acknowledge that blogs are a force to be reckoned with4
At least this should alleviate some concerns that radianrss was something bad. I mean, it might be, but we have an idea who is behind it. Hello, radian6 people, I know you’re watching!
UPDATE: It seems the radianrss identifier has now changed to R6_FeedFetcher_(www.radian6.com/crawler) so it probably aims at being a bit more transparent about its origins. I haven’t checked my server logs but FeedBurner tells me there are now 3 different clients using this identifier.
- No, FeedBurner does not show any information about radianrss either [↩]
- Trying to get a reverse look-up failed where I attempted it [↩]
- radian6 - about us [↩]
- Beat the cliche out of my head, please… [↩]
Thanks for solving the mystery. It wasn’t bugging me too much, but I just wondered.
Well it had piqued my curiosity when I read reports that all requests were coming from pretty much the same address. Some were also under the impression that it may be malicious, but no obvious indication about that yet.
It looks like this spider has a bug. It has been asking for a page on my site that has a premanent redirect. It retries the page 8 times, then processes the redirects and hits the new page 9 times. But it does not check the original page off it’s list and comes back 5 mintutes later for 9 more tries. It’s been at it for more than a day.
The page it is stuck on is http://www.hmdb.org/marker.asp?marker=2158
I guess I should count myself lucky for not having anything of the sort, but indeed that seems to be quite an issue. I read others’ complaints that radianrss is a bit too pushy when it comes to indexing. Luckily, it shouldn’t be hard to block, seeing that so far only two IPs have shown up using this identifier.
Indeed, it also likes to re-crawl sites almost every time it hits them. I can’t quite understand that part, I don’t think it would be good for their servers either.
Called these guys based on the phone number at radian6.com, they added my site to their blacklist. They claimed that they are checking blog posts for comments. Given that I still don’t know why they would need to check back for comments every 2-30 seconds. In my case I’m a deal site (using WordPress) so they black listed me.
I guess I’m glad they cooperate when asked to do so. The only benefit from this agent is for their customers, so if they don’t play nice, people will start blocking them altogether. I agree though, the aggressiveness is not justified.
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Many thanks man. I been trying to figure out the radianrss in my logs for a bit. Could not find much in fo either. great job man :)
Peace,
Mich in the Web
http://mich.in
Hi, well I have had this address popping up on my server log for the past few days and wondered as to what it was. I tried resolving the host with no luck and also tried a whois with even less luck. I guessed something odd is going on with this IP, so found this site through google. My simple solution was to block their IP range. :) Thanks for the info tho!