Is Microsoft watching me?

March 30, 2005 2:16 PM

Is Microsoft watching me? I was going over the web statistics for my small website and the number one url that traffics my site is located at One Microsoft Way in Redmond Washington. The rest can be explained by friends and family, what's going on here?

The IP from microsoft is 207.46.98.88 if that helps

posted by Mark5four0 to computers & internet (5 comments total)

Is Microsoft watching me?

Inasmuch as that IP address corresponds to MSNbot.msn.com (the crawler for search.msn.com), yes.
posted by alopez at 2:27 PM on March 30, 2005

I've noticed that msnbot seems to subscribe to my rss feed to check when my blog's been updated, which isn't a bad idea (although, as it then checks that every couple of hours, surely a request for index.* and a data check would do the same thing?)
posted by benzo8 at 2:57 PM on March 30, 2005

Search bots like this sometimes get lost in pages coming back around and never really getting out. I saw this happen once to a PHP calendar application that created a maze of pages that linked to each other in a way that the MSN bot couldn't find their way out of. The bot ate up a huge load of the available bandwidth that the host allowed on a per month basis. A quick hack to the .robots file took care of it.
posted by pwb503 at 3:00 PM on March 30, 2005

As noted, it is MSN search's web crawler. I've noticed that it is extremely active on my relatively unread and unlinked blog -- much more so than Google's bot -- and yet, Google has indexed a post I made last weekend while MSN has not
posted by Good Brain at 7:46 PM on March 30, 2005

I've just seen the same thing on two of my Gallery sites this month. The MSNbot accounted for about 50% of my hits. I can only assume they indexed every image.
posted by bh at 6:34 AM on March 31, 2005