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Is Microsoft Crawling Google?

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the put-on-your-foil-hat dept.

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."

4 of 480 comments (clear)

  1. Block MSN from crawling your sites! by Alascom · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Add this to robots.txt

    User-agent: msnbot
    Disallow: /

    I will fight Micro$oft efforts to monopolize another area of the tech industry (to its detriment)

    Google: Don't be evil!
    Microsoft: Greed is good, greed works!

  2. From TFA: by Nosf3ratu · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Obviously my conclusion should be taken as a grain of salt but it's a definite possibility. Microsoft very well could be screen scraping Google (or maybe even using their API, LOL) and crawling the urls it finds. It makes sense from a business case but I wonder if there are any legal issues there. I doubt it.

    It's official: 14 year old AOL'ers are now known as "IT journalists."

    Call me a literary pedantic, but I don't trust much journalism that includes "LOL".

    --
    The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori
  3. Re:Difficult to do if Google doesn't want them to by sipy · · Score: 0, Redundant

    I don't think Google should block Microsoft's IP address ranges. If they did, how would Microsoft's employees get thier work done? You think they use search.msn.com? BAAAAAaaahhhh!

  4. The Question is... by Fizzl · · Score: 0, Redundant

    So what?

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