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    Live Search Testing New Crawler; MSNBot/2.0b

    The Live Search Blog announced they are letting a new robot loose. The new search engine crawler is named msnbot/2.0b and will be added to the army of current MSN spiders, currently named msnbot/1.1. The new spider is currently being tested but will ultimately replace the old spider. The new spider will respect the current […]

    The Live Search Blog announced they are letting a new robot loose. The new search engine crawler is named msnbot/2.0b and will be added to the army of current MSN spiders, currently named msnbot/1.1.

    The new spider is currently being tested but will ultimately replace the old spider. The new spider will respect the current robots.txt protocol set up for MSNBot, so no need to set up anything new in your robots.txt file. In addition, Microsoft promised to crawl slowly in their msnbot/2.0b tests.

    MSNBot/1.1 is not that old. It was added back in February of this year and introduced HTTP compression and conditional gets.


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    About the Author

    Barry Schwartz

    Barry Schwartz

    Barry Schwartz is a technologist and a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics.

    In 2019, Barry was awarded the Outstanding Community Services Award from Search Engine Land, in 2018 he was awarded the US Search Awards the "US Search Personality Of The Year," you can learn more over here and in 2023 he was listed as a top 50 most influential PPCer by Marketing O'Clock.

    Barry can be followed on X here and you can learn more about Barry Schwartz over here or on his personal site.