MedCenaBot — about our crawler
MedCena indexes publicly available medicine prices from 5 Latvian online pharmacies to help users find the best deal. This page describes our automated crawler and how to reach us.
Bot identification
Our bot identifies itself with the following User-Agent string — you can recognise it in your server logs:
Which sites we visit
The bot only visits public product pages of the following Latvian online pharmacies. We honour each site's robots.txt, do not register accounts, and do not visit protected pages.
What data we collect
We collect only the factual data needed for price comparison. We do not store any pharmacy-authored content.
What we collect
- · Price and discount price
- · Stock status
- · Link to the product page
- · EAN/barcode for product identification
What we do NOT collect
- · Pharmacy-authored product descriptions
- · Customer reviews and ratings
- · No account creation on pharmacies
- · No visits to carts, checkouts, user pages
Request rate
The bot makes at most one request every 2 seconds per domain, with no parallel connections. Responses with 429 or 5xx status trigger exponential back-off. We aim to place minimal load on pharmacy servers.
Opt out of indexing
If you represent a pharmacy and do not want your site indexed, contact us at this email. We will remove your pharmacy from the crawler rotation within 24 hours.
bot@medcena.lvFeed partnership
Instead of us crawling your site, you can send us a standard XML product feed (similar to Salidzini.lv). This reduces load on your servers and provides more accurate data for our users.
partners@medcena.lv