Made in Geel, Belgium
Baken is the index Inka, a personal assistant, searches: what places, towns and the sites they point to say on their own websites. It starts in Geel, and reaches further, ring by ring.
ba·ken /ˈbaː.kə(n)/
Dutch, noun · het baken, plural bakens
From Middle Dutch baken, from Old Frisian bāken. English beacon comes from the same Germanic word, *baukną: a sign, a signal.
Baken wants to be that for what places say about themselves: something to take your bearings from, where everything can be traced to the page it came from.
BakenBot is Baken's web crawler, run by SeeMe AI BV. It reads your robots.txt first and follows it. Here is how to tell it's ours, and how to stop it.
It asks each site for one page at a time, at least 10 seconds apart, or longer if your robots.txt sets a Crawl-delay. If your site answers 429 or 503, it leaves it alone for as long as Retry-After says, or an hour.
On later visits it asks only for what changed, when your site supports that (ETag or Last-Modified).
It identifies itself as BakenBot/0.1 (+https://baken.dev/bakenbot), and reads from 213.239.220.146 and 2a01:4f8:a0:70c4::2, whose reverse DNS is bakenbot.baken.dev.
Check it both ways:
$ host 213.239.220.146 146.220.239.213.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer bakenbot.baken.dev. $ host bakenbot.baken.dev bakenbot.baken.dev has address 213.239.220.146 bakenbot.baken.dev has IPv6 address 2a01:4f8:a0:70c4::2
Add this to your robots.txt:
User-agent: BakenBot Disallow: /
On its next visit, BakenBot stops reading your site and deletes what it kept of it. More on opting out
What it keeps goes into Baken, the index Inka searches, so everything Inka says can be traced to where it came from.
From a place's pages, BakenBot also reads its opening hours, and notes when the website listed for a place is no longer the place's own. Mapr, a map service, may use those two facts in its place details.
None of it is used to train models, sold, or published as a dataset.
A question about BakenBot, something to remove, or anything else about Baken. What you ask to have removed is removed within 7 days, from the index too.