Msnbot
Web crawler used by MSN Search (2004-2010)
Msnbot was a web-crawling robot (type of internet bot), deployed by Microsoft to collect documents from the web to build a searchable index for the MSN Search engine. It went into beta in 2004, and had full public release in 2005. The month of October 2010 saw the official retirement of msnbot from most active web crawling duties and its replacement by bingbot.
As of September 2015, msnbot was still active from the Microsoft and the Bing webmaster help & howto documentation still indicated that msnbot was active (but that it would retire soon). The verification tool for bingbot previously did not recognise msnbot IP addresses. A test executed on 2016-02-22 resulted in a yes: "Verdict for IP address 157.55.39.150: Yes - this IP address is a verified Bingbot IP address. Name: msnbot-157-55-39-150.search.msn.com."
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Msnbot”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
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