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

MSN and Google

[stratjakt]

Can both crawl up my ass.

And who cares what Jamie Crowell (or whoever), random blogger, thinks MSN might be doing, no doubt based purely on "ms sucks" rhetoric?

Re:Difficult to do if Google doesn't want them to

[superpulpsicle]

Hey it's not easy to block any gorilla, nevermind a trillion dollar one. Though again, Google should just block the word "windows" and "microsoft" at the javascript level on the main page.

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

[iMMersE]

I'm going to save people a whole lot of time reading this story.

Firstly, from the article :

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.

When I read the "LOL" bit, I realised it was my kid brother who had written the article.

And as for a quick summary of the hundreds of comments that follow :

"IANAL but ..."
"M$ are poo, Google are ace"
"M$ M$ M$ M$ ..."
"I haven't read the article, but here's my opinion ..."
"Google and MSN don't obey my robot.txt." "That's because it's robots.txt ..."

This post has been a free public service.