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MSNBOT

Jeremy blog about the crawler from Microsoft. So far I didn’t see its footstep at my log yet. There’s an anonymous posted to Dave Winer’s blog saying:

They have Google in their crosshairs. They are trying to replicate every feature of Google in the next year, and have tie-ins with the next version of IE (including a ‘search’ box right on the browser toolbar that by default points at MSN Search) and in Windows Longhorn (the Search function in the shell will have an Internet option that will go to MSN by default). They made a build-vs-buy decision in the last few months (in fact they made an informal offer to purchase Google, which was refused).

According to him, MSN Search is currently depend on Inktomi and LookSmart. And MSN Search got $150m in profit last year! Wow, looks like the targetted Ads do rocks for them. Inktomi has been bought over by Yahoo, it’s significant for the software giant in Redmond to build their own crawler.

It’s glad to see they start taking the step. If they long ago trying to simulate Google, MS users wouldn’t be suffered from their support site and MSDN search. And for years we’ve been used to rely on google to search issues related to Windows, like site:support.microsoft.com IE6 Sp1, site:msdn.microsoft.com SOAP… what a shame of Microsoft!