For booksellers
How Near Fine searches your shop
Near Fine is a book search. When a reader looks for a book, it asks each bookshop that delivers to them whether it has a copy, and links the reader to the shop’s own page to buy it.
- User-Agent
NearFine/1.0 (+https://nearfine.com/bot)- When
- Each time a reader searches
- How much
- A request or two per search, a few at most
- Where
- Search results and book pages that your robots.txt allows
- Never
- Carts, checkout, accounts or whole catalogues
- Run by
- Line of Flight B.V., Amsterdam
What we ask for
A search asks your shop for one book, by its ISBN or by the reader’s keywords, and reads the results. A reader who saves a search for a book that isn’t out there yet has it rerun once a day, and we record the prices of a short list of books once a day too. We don’t crawl catalogues or follow sitemaps.
We only read pages your robots.txt allows. Where it asks for a delay between requests, we wait that long.
What your shop gets
Readers, sent straight to your book page with the price they’ll pay. Near Fine doesn’t sell books or take payment for them. Where a shop runs an affiliate programme, we earn a commission through it on what readers buy.
How to tell it’s us
Anyone can copy a User-Agent, so our requests also carry a signature (Web Bot Auth), which you or your CDN can check against the key we publish at nearfine.com/.well-known/http-message-signatures-directory.
We search from a small, fixed set of server addresses. Write to us and we’ll send them, so you can let them through your firewall.
Stop us, or let us in
If you’d rather we didn’t search your shop, write to [email protected] and we’ll take it out of our searches. Write to the same address if your firewall or bot protection is turning us away and you’d like readers to find you.