11 replies to this topic

[Michael]

Anyone noticed a dip in MSN crawler traffic?

Since early december it looks like MSN crawler traffic (average "hits" per day) is down and Google robot traffic is up. Anyone else notice something like this?

Not tying this into rankings, just commenting on the bots.

- Michael

[Randy]

I haven't noticed that on the handful of sites I've checked so far today Michael. Though all of the majors seem to run in spurts when I bother to look at the spider traffic.

I did notice a week or so ago that Yahoo! Slurp seems to be awfully busy scurrying around most of my sites. Far and away the leader. By nearly twice as much as the next highest spider for some reason. MSNbot and Googlebot switched back and forth between 2nd and 3rd place, depending upon the site and time frame I looked at.

[maleman]

Anyone noticed a dip in MSN crawler traffic?

Yes.

I noticed that for a while now.

Anither thing I just noticed five minutes ago is that I did a search on the MSN Home page search bar and the result was from the MSN Beta search engine.

That's the first time for me.

Is MSN's beta now live?

[Randy]

I just got the beta with a test search too.

I've seen that off and on if you timed it just right for the last several weeks. Like they're switching back and forth during load testing or whatever.

It certainly won't hurt my feelings at all if they stay with the Beta.

[maleman]

They must getting close to a full scale launch of the new engine.

I'd be glad to see it happen too.

Another unrelated thing:

Before the HR site update, I got email notifications about threads I'm watching and the link in the email led directly to the thread.

The last couple emails, the link leads to the forum index page and not the thread itself. Is this normal?

[Randy]

No clue on that one Maleman. I don't subscribe to any threads since I seem to be around here all the time anyway.

If it hasn't been asked yet you might want to pose the question down in the Forum Tips and Help section, as that's where Scottie will look for things like that.

FWIW, I think we'll all know pretty much immediately when MSN is starts using their own stuff full time. I fully expect that there will be numerous press releases coming out of Redmond, and likely even some TV commercials trying to persuade people over to their search product.

[leadegroot]

I understand that they are pushing the beta out to live search to increasing percentages of uses, but supposedly it won't go live until next month.
(It must be true, I read it on the Internet )

[Los_Dev]

Hi Michael

Regarding your point with the MSN crawlers, on the 5 sites we have checked this week ALL of them have shown a massive increase in visits this month to date in comparison to the last quarter averaged out.

[tempy]

What is the name of the different MSN Bots. Is there a different one for the Beta and one for the current site?

If it's any help, MSNBot (the only MSN bot that visits currently) on one of my sites is increasingly rampant and is currently clocking up more that twice as many hits as Googlebot and 10x as many as Inktomi.

[Randy]

The "old" MSN results are supplied by Yahoo! tempy. So you'll see no spider from MSN for those.

The new Beta results are a result of the MSNbot crawls.

[chrishirst]

msnbot is MSN's own crawler, existing results come from Yahoo (Slurp)

[tempy]

The "old" MSN results are supplied by Yahoo! tempy.  So you'll see no spider from MSN for those.

The new Beta results are a result of the MSNbot crawls.

Thanks.