Wednesday, February 13, 2008

It looks like the Live Search team has announced they've released their MSN Bot v1.1 (and changed the user agent string to "msnbot/1.1"). They've noted two significant (and welcome) features.

  • HTTP compression
  • Conditional GETs

What does this mean for server owners and operators? Just a more-efficient way of crawling your sites for indexing, assuming your servers support the features. Most servers support HTTP compression, and links to instructions for configuring it are provided in the Live Search team's blog entry.

If you're interested in knowing whether your site/server supports these two features, the Live Search team has also put up a page where you can run a quick test.

Of course, depending on how they detect search indexing bots, some apps may need to add the new user agent string to their configurations.



Add/Read: Comments [1]
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Wednesday, February 13, 2008 7:05:56 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
#  
Thursday, February 14, 2008 3:20:46 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
Why do they persist with using msn? I thought MSN was dead?

Is it MSN or Live that Microsoft supports?
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