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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."
Has anyone out there seen similar behavior on their own sites? Please comment with your qualitative/objective data if so.
/. 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.
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:
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.
All Google has to do is run some unusual queries through MSN, check their logs, find the IP addresses and block them.
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.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
The new search engine's name will be Mooglesoft.
Couldn't Google just crawl Microsoft in return? Then they'd be stuck in an endless loop, and William Shatner can then swoop in, crack some skulls, and save the day.
Or something like that.
biffnix
Don't Die Wondering
Nah, never happens....
100% Insightful
I can say that they been crawling like mad as of late, Google, Yahoo, and MSN. I say this because on my site I have had a lot of traffic from all three, and my site is not a popular, or even an important one but I seen a lot of traffic from them. Not just once a week or a few times a week but every day. There are big updates coming. I was not surprised to see the article about google doubling their index, I know something was coming from the way they are crawling unimportant/unpopular sites.
more evil than satan
ROOFLES!
Such trouble. Just buy the damned company.
Well, that kind of business practice would be completely out of character for Microsoft.
This is a non-story. A good Slashdot headline will be when they get caught actually NOT doing something like this.
Microsoft Has Original Idea and Implements it By Themselves
From the 70%-of-slashdot-editors-suffered-heart-attacks -reading-this-submission Dept.
"Google happily changed its habbits..."
Google is Catholic?
The Geek Crew
The question is why? If they are doing this, are they simply going to present the results as their own, or are they going to work some magic and find the most relevant search results from ALL the engines and use those.
In the first case, it's a slimy business practice. In the second, it's fairly cunning ( and has been tried before ).
In either case, I doubt google is in any real danger. They are to search engines what MS is to the desktop. And while MS has squandered that advantage in the desktop arena ( reader homework: 250 word essay as to why ), google is only improving on their work.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
If you've been watching the logs to your site lately Microsoft has been RAPING most servers. Most crawlers will pick through pages with large lists 1 at a time, then come back every hour or so.
MSN starting last week has been pulling EVERY LINK in sequence from my site. Even the larger Artist Index pages of my site.
Seriously, I've had this same spider on my site for about 36 hours now.
Wasn't that the "plot" to the movie Anti-Trust?
Bugs are just features that have been fixed.
Actually, search engines profit from ad revenue displayed on search result pages (amoung other things). The search engine with the best results SHOULD attract the most users. Increasing the number of users can correlate to increasing profits from ads. Thus, search engine sites profit from having THEIR 'bots crawl YOUR site. On the flip side, we as web users, profit (non-monetarily) by having a better search engine.
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.
When men used to be men
My website is the #1 site listed with specific Criteria on Google. Consistently for the last 2 months. I try the same thing with MSN search and My site does not even show up at all.
If they are searching Google, they haven't done it recently, or else they haven't gotten to my site yet.
It would be easy for Google to insert a small fraction of non-sequiturs in the results, look at Microsoft's search results, and then sue for misuse. Even if MSFT uses random proxies to avoid detection, it cannot manually recheck all the hits to make sure they are correct (if they could, they had the resources to check all the sites, then they not need to crawl Google. A few made-up sites or inappropriate search hits would be enough to establish a pattern of abuse.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
You can't get to every page on the internet just by starting at one page and recursively following links, therefore the more places you from, the more likely you are to have 100% coverage.
I could imagine that Microsoft just needs a few thousand URL's evenly-spread across the internet just to seed their crawler, which they can get from Google by using a list of most popular queries.
Once their crawler has so many starting points it can do the rest itself.
And got banned from using google. Seriously.
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.
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?
Visit the Game Programming Wiki!
Try entering a known Googlebomb into the MS search engine. "litigious bastards" shows up www.sco.com as the number one hit.
Microsoft's beta search engine's index doubled in size to over 8 billion pages.
SIGFAULT
Hey Google, please don't make us read those wacky JPG/GIF letter scrambles with criss-cross lines and input the random characters into a field before submitting a search.
"Hold on a sec while I Goog- Huh? Grrrr.... H... P... 7... O... wait no, 7... zero... ummm...
This one gang kept wanting me to join cause I'm pretty good with a bo staff.
This whole article is based on the speculation of a web master who notices that a bot which allegedly isn't leaving behind a bot name is crawling his site. He then figures out that, oh look, there is a standard record in his server log.
And I'm supposed to take this clown's "friend" seriously? That's not a good start, anyway.
But then there's the real howler: the site can allegedly only be found through site: on Google. How does the friend know that? Has he done a complete crawl of the web to find all forward links to any image in his site -- even broken ones? MSNBot, like all bots, recognizes that many anchors are broken, and tries plausible corrections around the broken links. That's particularly useful with a deep link, where the deep link may have timed out but the shallow link still exists.
Movie? I thought that thing was a documentary!
It's interesting to know that Bill Gates has been forced to go back to his roots...
Yes this might sound like a rant, but somehow (partly my fault), the MSN Spider bot found one of my joke cgi scripts that translate pages to my own imaginary language. It's linked nowhere on my site, and maybe 3-4 places on the entire web. Said MSNBot began to pull PDF after PDF through the script, in addition to other large files, it also tried mailto: links. All in all said spider pulled about 1GB of data in a single day. My site's previous average was about maybe 300-400MB a Month. Let's just say that entire M$ IP Netblock was quickly filtered through iptables.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Google keeps track of IP addresses and blocks which are doing an unusually high number of searches and disables requests from them.
How do I know? Because a friend of mine decided to find out how common all TLAs are (three-letter acronyms) by counting Google hits on each TLA. This was before the Google API, so he did it with good old fashioned HTTP/HTML. It didn't take long for Google to flag him as evil and block access from his IP block.
Sure, Microsoft could find some way around this-- using different enough IP addresses to conceal the source-- but that's more trouble than it's worse. Worse yet, it sets up a cat-and-mouse game and keeps M$ dependent on Google-- when their stated goal is to beat Google at its own game.
I've got a simpler explaination for what the author is seeing. His evidence is based on the fact that some pages being requested exist only in Google's cache. Well, spiders are supposed to do breadth-first searches so they don't hit the same site too often. Microsoft is probably going against data it collected a few weeks ago but hasn't put on its public servers yet. (Why not? Could be lots of things. Maybe they haven't put enough hardware on the front end to support the amount of data they have on the back end. Or maybe they're just slow.)
As much as I'd like to bash M$, there's nothing here that really looks suspicious to me.
Dowell likens it to leaving your garbage on the curb--anyone could conceivably go through it and take whatever is there for their own.
My garbage doesn't have a copyright statement, contain my patented technology, nor does it come with terms of service or licensing agreements.
Or just return a bunch of fake links:
"Madame X's House of Leather"
"Hot slutty teens!"
"Wet & Wild College Girls!"
Etc.
Microsoft would stop leeching REAL quick.
This statement is forty-five characters long.
And MSN crawling Google's site is really no different. As long as the Google data is on a public server, it is fair game to crawl.
microsoft is looking at old pages, google uses a cache...ergo microsoft must be using google.
if we're going to use that kind of logic, I could just as easily come up with "afghanistan is in the middle east and supports terrorist, iraq is in the middle east...ergo, iraq must support terrorists", and use it to make a case for invading iraq...but you don't see......oh wait
so if the msn bot does what they say it doesn't do what it's supposed to do.