Hello Sindh

HelloSindhBot

HelloSindhBot is the web crawler of Hello Sindh, the official web portal of the Government of Sindh, operated by the Information Department. It reads public pages on Government of Sindh websites so that citizens can search them and ask questions in English, Urdu and Sindhi. Every answer links back to the official page it came from.

How to recognise it

User agent:

HelloSindhBot/1.0 (+https://hellosindh.ai/en/crawler)

All requests come from these IP addresses (also published as JSON at /crawler-ips.json):

172.236.157.135
2600:3c15::2000:9cff:fedc:6cc6

What it does

Reads public web pages and PDF documents of Government of Sindh departments and attached bodies listed in the Hello Sindh directory.
Visits each website once a day, at night (from 02:00 Pakistan time).
Makes one request at a time to a website and pauses after each one; at most 80 pages and 20 PDFs per website per day.
Follows robots.txt: rules for “HelloSindhBot” (or its earlier name, “SindhGovPortalBot”) if present, otherwise the rules for all crawlers (“*”).
Never logs in, fills in forms or reads pages that need an account.
Uses what it reads only to build the Hello Sindh search index and answers with links to the source. It is not used to train AI models.

How to control it

To keep it out of part of a website, or out of the whole website, add a group for it to robots.txt:

User-agent: HelloSindhBot
Disallow: /private/

# or, to stop it completely
User-agent: HelloSindhBot
Disallow: /

Changes are picked up on its next daily visit.

Contact

Hello Sindh is operated by the Information Department, Government of Sindh. See website governance for who is responsible for the portal.