Sogou web spider: purpose and historical log entries

Sogou web spider is an automated crawler used by the Sogou search engine. Its role includes visiting web pages and discovering links. Requests carrying its name should still be assessed using the server logs, not assumed to be authenticated because the identifier looks familiar.

Historical records

The site recorded the following IP addresses with the country label China:

• 49.7.21.83
• 118.184.177.17
• 61.135.159.182
• 123.183.224.18

Recorded user-agent:

Sogou web spider/4.0(+http://www.sogou.com/docs/help/webmasters.htm#07)

These are historical entries, not an exhaustive or verified current list of Sogou addresses. The version is the one declared in the string, and the country label is not proof of the operator's identity.

Investigating crawler activity

Review requested paths, response codes and frequency. If many requests concern similar URLs, look for query parameters or links that generate repeated variants of the same content. Do not infer that every request from a whole country has the same purpose.

The official Sogou webmaster guide, in Chinese, describes the spider and its support for robots.txt. Use operator guidance and your own logs when deciding whether crawl controls are needed; do not treat a recorded bot name as permission to access private resources.

For an overview, see what a web crawler is and what it does.