New MSN bot?

Maybe I'm just slow to notice, but when did the MSN bot go from version 0.11 to version 0.3?

Seems like a huge version jump ;) Think they're getting any closer to actually going live with the data they've been harvesting?

Owen

i am new in this seo thing,... well not new new but i got some months on it. i want to ask how
do you notice that?

You can see it in the weblogs. I tend to read the raw weblogs so I can see exactly what's happening on my site. The new bot signature is now showing the 0.3 version.

Hello calufa. Welcome to the forums here.
>i want to ask how do you notice that?
Do you have access to your server logs? They are a valuable source of information. Here is a line from one of mine and a brief explaination:

"msnbot/0.3 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)" is the user agent field. This entry shows that it is msnbot rather than a human.
65.54.188.78 is the IP address of the request
[29/Sep/2004:23:54:52 -0500] is the time of the request
"GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0":
GET means a request for a file. (Rather than posting a form or whatever.)
/robots.txt is the file requested
HTTP/1.0 is geek stuff (I resemble that remark...)
200 104 200 means code-200, success; 104 means 104 bytes transferred.

If you need more information, please post again.

- Mike T.

Nice explanation quadcity/Mike/others ... I'll just add that in addition to looking at the raw log files, many of the log analyzers will show not only the name, but the version of the "bot" hitting you ... plus the numbers of hits ... but the later can be wildly variable ... for instance on www.komar.org, msnbot grabbed 42 pages on Oct 10th, but 204 pages on Oct 11th (googlebot was 149 and 264 respectively) so it seems to come in waves.