] July 1, 2004
] Hungry Bot Behind Microsoft's New Search
]
] Webmasters across the Internet have been tracking a surge
] in spider activity coming from Microsoft's MSNbot over
] the past few months and sleuthing over what kind of new
] search offerings the software giant is cooking up.
]
] MSNbot ... appears to be aggressively
] crawling the Web as part of the algorithmic search effort
] to be included at a future point in its newly revised MSN
] Search portal.
]
] In a sample of ... Website traffic logs ..., we saw a substantial
] increase in activity by its MSNbot crawler in May. In
] most cases, the number of visits more than doubled. The
] activity increased in June though by a smaller
] percentage.