Is Microsoft Crawling Google?

triplecoil writes "Jason Dowdell over at WebProNews has written a piece questioning a tactic Microsoft might be using to beef up its new search engine. He thinks they might be dipping into Google's results to supplement its own. Dowdell likens it to leaving your garbage on the curb--anyone could conceivably go through it and take whatever is there for their own."

Comments

Don't concern yourself with this crap...

[garcia]

Has anyone out there seen similar behavior on their own sites? Please comment with your qualitative/objective data if so.

Sure, I see crawlers on my site all the time sometimes hitting the same URL over and over again. Do I understand their repetitive behavior? No. Do I care what they are doing? No, as long as they are obeying my robots.txt.

I have complained before about MSNbot ignoring changes to robots.txt while Google happily changed its habbits (I can't find the link sorry). My recent fighting with Googlebot has come to a head when I had to disallow them access to my gallery completely because they refused to honor anything except Disallow: /. I had to go so far as to point Googlebot at my robots.txt and tell it to remove all the previous links. It was rather annoying dealing with support via email from Googlebot as they have apparently taken on the stance of "we don't care but you should put meta tags in all your files so that we don't index those pages." Umm, you are crawling MY site for YOUR profit, you do as I say, not the other way around.

Do I care if MSNbot is crawling Google and then finding sites and links to search? No as it's none of OUR concern. What is OUR concern is our own robots.txt and how the spiders interact with our sites through that file. Let Google deal with Microsoft/MSNbot if that's what needs to be done but don't concern yourself with it otherwise.

Re:Don't concern yourself with this crap...

[finkployd]

Umm, you are crawling MY site for YOUR profit, you do as I say, not the other way around.

No offense dude, but you are the one who put the site out their publically. Now if they are DoSing you then you have a valid complaint but robots.txt is just there as a friendly suggestion. I can write a search bot today that completely ignores it and there is nothing wrong with that (except perhaps ethically but even that is arguable) If you don't want people (or bots) viewing it then password protect it or take it off the public interweb.

Re:Don't concern yourself with this crap...

[mollymoo]

If don't want your site indexed or cached by google. Go here and follow the directions.

I shouldn't need to go and fill out some form for every search engine to protect my rights. One accepted standard way to say "do not index this" should be sufficient. This is an automated system. There is an accepted automated method to stop crawlers indexing your site (robots.txt). If they (Google or anyone else) take your copyrighted content and reproduce it automatically when their automatic system could have automatically respected your explicitly stated and legally protected rights they are knowlingly making a flagrant copyright violation.

Difficult to do if Google doesn't want them to

[Anonymous Coward]

All Google has to do is run some unusual queries through MSN, check their logs, find the IP addresses and block them.

Does it violate Google's Terms of Service

[winkydink]

If so, they have legal remedies.

If not, it's called doing business and gaining an advantage any legitimate way that you can.

I think the interesting bit is in the conclusion. If MS is using this to establish a baseline, they can benchmark their spider against Google's over time.

Absurd

[targo]

The claims are so absurd I don't even know where to start.
1) His whole theory is based on the "fact" that the only way in the world to find his pages is to use site:www.sitename.com in Google, implying that Google has cached the results from an earlier crawl. Of course, there is no way that the Microsoft search couldn't have also cached it.
2) Then, he claims that Microsoft is probably screen-scraping Google's results (for all the millions of sites out there), and using these results to recrawl those sites? This doesn't even make any sense.
3) And last but not least, Microsoft is certainly basing its whole search architecture on the assumption that Google wouldn't ever notice MSN mirroring its whole index. Yeah right.

Terrible article

[angio]

The author suggests that microsoft must be scraping google b/c the only place _he_ could find the URLs they're requesting was google's cache.

Uh.

Microsoft has been developing their internal search engine for quite a while now. Part of developing a search engine is using it to crawl and creating a large corpus of test data. It's hugely likely that M$ has had a working crawler system for much, much longer than would be indicated by their public announcement. Quite a few people who helped develop Altavista at HP/Compaq/DEC research joined Microsoft Research about two years ago - the kind of people who could write a high-performance crawler in their sleep and wake up feeling refreshed.

That article seems like baseless, uninformed speculation, to put it not-so-politely.

This could be entirely natural...

[theluckyleper]

I'm certainly no Microsoft groupie, but this behavior may not be as sinister as it seems. Afterall, Google is on the internet, too. There are links found all over the internet to Google, with some specific search term embedded in the URL. If MSN's bot happened upon a link to a Google search page, is it somehow wrong for the MSN bot to follow that link, and spider as normal?