Comments on: Is Microsoft watching me?

Question: Is Microsoft watching me?

Mark5four0 — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 14:16:40 -0800

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

By: alopez

alopez — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 14:27:19 -0800

Is Microsoft watching me?

Inasmuch as that IP address corresponds to MSNbot.msn.com (the crawler for search.msn.com), yes.

By: benzo8

benzo8 — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 14:57:20 -0800

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?)

By: pwb503

pwb503 — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 15:00:07 -0800

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.

By: Good Brain

Good Brain — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 19:46:07 -0800

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

By: bh

bh — Thu, 31 Mar 2005 06:34:44 -0800

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.