It was created and designed by Yang Sun,[1] Isaac G. Councill,[2] Ziming Zhuang[3] and C. Lee Giles.
BotSeer served as a resource for studying the regulation and behavior of Web robots as well as information about the creation of effective robots.txt files and crawler implementations.
It was publicly available on the World Wide Web at the College of Information Sciences and Technology at the Pennsylvania State University.
However, some people received BotSeer negatively, arguing that it contradicted the purpose of the robots.txt convention.
[6] BotSeer had also had set up a honeypot[7] to test the ethics, performance and behavior of web crawlers.