Centinel AnalyticaOWLer
OWLer is the web crawler of OpenWebSearch.eu, an EU-funded research consortium building the Open Web Index, an open European web index made available for third-party search applications. It is built on StormCrawler and identifies itself with the contact address owler@ows.eu; the operator documents that it follows robots.txt. This entry covers the bare OWLer identifier; the OWLer-W variant is catalogued as its own entry. Despite the similar name it is unrelated to Owler Inc. (owler.com), the business intelligence platform catalogued separately.
At a glance
- Operator: OpenWebSearch.eu
- Type: Research
How Centinel checks it
- User agent: The request calls itself this crawler. Anyone can send the same string.
OWLer publishes nothing Centinel can check a source against, so a match reports the name and leaves the source unconfirmed. The match tokens, verification domains, and address feeds are not published here.
Allowing or blocking it
The crawler object in the /validate response sets access_allowed to true only for a verified source that your tenant allowlists. A policy rule can allow or block this crawler by its category, Research.