Microsoft has a post today on its Bing Community blog alerting website owners that they may start seeing a lot of pings from the user agent “msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)”. Not to worry, they say, despite the scary MSN Web 1.0-name, this is just the BingBot, crawling sites, doing its indexing job.
While Microsoft has updated the bot’s version number (from 1.1), it isn’t changing the name, it notes. But what’s interesting is the part of the post from Microsoft that reads:
We do not anticipate any problems related to our increasing emphasis on MSNBot 2, but the unexpected can’t always be avoided, no matter how hard you try! As such, we wanted to preemptively alert folks to the most effective way to report bot and crawling issues to Bing’s support team in case they arise.
Problems? What sort of problems? Is the BingBot going to become self-aware, Skynet-style? Microsoft gives no details. I’m scared.
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