- Image via CrunchBase, source unknown
The Live Search Blog has announced that they are testing a new robot. The new crawler is called msnbot/2.0b and will be added to the current crew LiveSearch spiders, which are now known as msnbot/1.1.
The new spider is being tested but it is expected to replace the old spider eventually. The new spider will adhere to the current robots.txt protocols set up for MSNBot. Microsoft has promised to crawl slowly in their msnbot/2.0b tests.
Live Search is committed to continuing to improve how we discover and crawl your content. In the coming weeks, we will be testing an update to MSNBot, which may show up as a new crawler name in your referrer logs. The new crawler user agent string will appear as:
msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)
You’ll still see the current version msnbot/1.1 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm) as Live Search’s primary user agent. We intend to ensure that any robots exclusion protocol you are using is respected. As such, you don’t need to update your Robots.txt file. We plan on crawling at a slow speed during the tests with the updated version.
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