Microsoft has a post today on its Bing Community blog alerting website owners that they may start seeing a lot of pings from the user agent “msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)”. Not to worry, they say, despite the scary MSN Web 1.0-name, this is just the BingBot, crawling sites, doing its indexing job.
While Microsoft has updated the bot’s version number (from 1.1), it isn’t changing the name, it notes. But what’s interesting is the part of the post from Microsoft that reads:
We do not anticipate any problems related to our increasing emphasis on MSNBot 2, but the unexpected can’t always be avoided, no matter how hard you try! As such, we wanted to preemptively alert folks to the most effective way to report bot and crawling issues to Bing’s support team in case they arise.
Problems? What sort of problems? Is the BingBot going to become self-aware, Skynet-style? Microsoft gives no details. I’m scared.
I had bad dreams about a MSFT robot last night. So weird you wrote about him today.
Seems like Andrew’s got some psychic powers. I guess we just need to wait and watch how this msnbot works. Is it gonna be better or worse than the older version? Only time will tell.
I received a lot of referrer spam from MSN and am still getting refer spam from bing.
My logs show lots of generic queries such as:
www. bing.com/search?q=hosting
www. bing.com/search?q=web
www. bing.com/search?q=authenticate
www. bing.com/search?q=flash
Obviously my site does not rank for these generic terms, Microsoft is playing their own game.
And they all come from microsoft IP adresses and don’t use msnbot as user agent, but IE.
Me too! My visitor logs are being attacked by Bing with false referrals just like the ones you list. This is such a clumsy way to see if websites are cloaking information and it forces webmasters to manually code/script a filter for such referrals as they are indistinguishable from real referrals from Bing.
It’s ok MG.
I got your back.
Is this John Connor?
You’ll be happy to heard that Tech-Com has been renamed to Tech-Com-Crunch.
No, Arnold himself
.
No, it’s Brandon.
They didnt want to call it bing as tons, and I mean tons of web software has unique rules for googlebot, slurp (yahoo and msnbot- If they change the UA name, tons of specific fixes that have been written for bots over the years wouldnt be applied.
good point.
Yep, Dan has it right. We thought about changing it but decided against it so we didnt break everyone’s rules.
they didn’t change the name because many sites use it to output custom versions to the bot. Problems probably refers to the change of version number on the strings from 1.1. to 2
Windows
Vista
Bing
7
Devil’s seed!
Kill’em all!!! XD
i would add visual studio, sql server and .net to that list
The warning is likely the lawyers telling them to do this.
Blodgett and others already have Bing as a non-event, distraction, but not so sure.
I am still using it, and seems okay.
Note that technically this isn’t a ‘ping’ as this is used to signify a real time update in the crawling universe.
This would qualify as a “hit” .
Kevin
Oh the windows live bing bot? I think it just crawls google anyway
fooey!
Why is that picture up there?
Siegler is notorious for tacking on tacky and irrelevant pictures to all of his posts.
bing bot is just agreeable
not like some crazy yandex…
Hopefully we’ll start to see BingBot visit our sites a bit more often… right now out of all the “large” search engine crawlers it appears msnbot hits the site with the lowest frequency.
Time for Bing to ramp it up.
Technically 3 main issues with Bots:
1. They might hog bandwidth too aggressively and cause a DoS attack
2. They might disobey directives in robots.txt (generally because of software bugs)
3. Spammers and Malicious hackers could emulate the bot and get access to restricted areas of the site, if the webmaster has special access for bots (nothing much MS can do here)
Finally, this is probably the MS way of saying Bing bot is still “beta” and will screw up
You might not get a Blue Screen of Death but your website may crash 
1. if your server is a 486SX, maybe
2. Because of software bugs ? Eeeer… which bot is too dumb to apply the simple rules of robots.txt ?
3. Who is dumb enough to give access to restricted areas to bots, based on the User-Agent string ?
Seriously, bots are a problem when they’re malicious (email harvesting, etc.) but even this king of bots are now better coded and don’t make their job looking like a DoS attack… to prevent beeing detected immediately.
Are you kidding? This is news? And you make us click through the fold to read “We do not anticipate any problems ..”?
Holy crap let’s try to stay focused. I had no idea that TC was so desperate for clicks. Pathetic.
a self aware bing bot. bingalicious bit.ly/lwpBi
I’m very curious as to what is going to happen with this bot.
Microsoft is blistering the tube with commercials for the new “decision” engine. This bot makes me curious, too…
aawhw thats nice from Microsoft to report this little bugger comes to visit may we play with it a lill. LOL
I still see only the regular MSNBot and MSN Media in my log stats. I use Awstats and I feel it’s not current on the activities of this new crawler.
Micro$oft is scaring me…
What can go wrong with a web spider?
Simple, it can hit your website over and over again like Denial of Service attack & make it unavailable for humans. Yeah, some Matrix + Terminator mash up .:D