Months ago MicroSoft announced that it would get serious about MSN Search, perhaps breaking its dependency on LookSmart, and it seems that they have jumped one of the first hurdles by developing a new web crawler.
1. What is MSNBOT?
MSNBOT is a prototype Web crawler robot developed by MSN Search (http://search.msn.com ). The robot is a software program that traverses the Web pages on a site, downloads the documents for indexing, and follows the hyperlinks that are referenced.
2. Once MSNBOT crawls my site, will my site show up in the search results on MSN Search?
This crawl is a prototype work. MSNBOT is not currently indexing for the MSN Search Engine, so your site may or may not show up in MSN Search results today. Although we have not set a date, it is our intention to eventually integrate the crawled contents into MSN Search results.
3. Why did you crawl my site; what is the purpose of your crawler?
MSNBOT indexes documents on the Internet so that they can be studied and used for purposes such as Web search engines
Links on MSNBOT:
Microsoft’s Explanation
AlwaysOn Blog Discussion
