After wondering why my website has seen a 250% (or more) increase in site traffic over the past week, I think I’ve found the answer.
It’s Taptu, a new search engine tailored for the iPhone.
Their bot, apparently, doesn’t behave like a bot. It acts like an iPhone, it serves a User-Agent string like an iPhone, so it looks, for all the world, or to a server log anyway, like an iPhone. An old iPhone. That loads lot of pages.
This, specifically, is its UA string:
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A542a Safari/419.3
And here I was, thinking suddenly that I was more interesting to ‘netizens everywhere. Alas, alack, and many alarums, I am not. It’s just a bot.
Published by Allyn
A writer, editor, journalist, sometimes coder, occasional historian, and all-around scholar, Allyn Gibson is the writer for Diamond Comic Distributors' monthly PREVIEWS catalog, used by comic book shops and throughout the comics industry, and the editor for its monthly order forms. In his over ten years in the industry, Allyn has interviewed comics creators and pop culture celebrities, covered conventions, analyzed industry revenue trends, and written copy for comics, toys, and other pop culture merchandise. Allyn is also known for his short fiction (including the Star Trek story "Make-Believe,"the Doctor Who short story "The Spindle of Necessity," and the ReDeus story "The Ginger Kid"). Allyn has been blogging regularly with WordPress since 2004.
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