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Platísimo

PlatisimoBot

Platísimo is an app where people rate specific dishes, not restaurants. So that a restaurant's page isn't empty on day one, we have a program — PlatisimoBot — that reads the menus published on restaurant websites, just as Google's search engine reads them.

If you've arrived here from your website's visitor log, it's because that program has been by.

What exactly it does

  • It always identifies itself. It shows up in your log as PlatisimoBot/0.1.
  • It reads your robots.txt before asking for any other page, and respects it. If it can't read it, it doesn't go in.
  • It waits four seconds between pages of your site. If your robots.txt asks it to go slower, it goes slower.
  • It reads at most 25 pages per site, and only up to two clicks from the home page. It's looking for the menu, not the rest.
  • It only requests pages and PDFs. It doesn't download photos or videos.
  • It doesn't fill in forms, enter any password-protected area or make bookings.
  • If a page asks not to be indexed, we don't use it.

What we keep, and why

We keep the page exactly as your server served it, together with its address, the date and the robots.txt rule that allowed us to read it. From it we take two things: the dish name and its price.

We keep the original page so we don't have to ask you for it again if we ever change our criteria.

We don't want your menu if you don't want us to have it

Write to us and we'll remove it. It's the fastest way and you don't need to touch anything on your site: tell us your website's address and we'll take it down. We won't ask for explanations.

Write to us

If you'd rather block us yourself

This is for whoever runs your website. By adding these two lines to your robots.txt, PlatisimoBot stops visiting the whole site:

User-agent: PlatisimoBot
Disallow: /

And if you'd rather it only visits the menu and nothing else:

User-agent: PlatisimoBot
Disallow: /
Allow: /carta

We check it on every pass, so the change takes effect next time, without you having to tell us.

Where we got your address

From OpenStreetMap, the free map anyone can edit, where someone noted your restaurant's website. We don't buy lists or copy them from TripAdvisor, TheFork, Glovo, Just Eat or Google: we don't visit those sites.