There are plenty of bots out there and, as a result, some conventions have arisen. Well-behaved bots identify themselves with a unique user-agent. They also follow the robots.txt conventions, which allow webmasters to control how their sites are crawled.
Here at Live Search, our crawlers are identified by the user-agent ‘MSNBot’. This may seem a little non-intuitive, but many webmasters depend on this, and so we chosen not to change it. In order to make things a little more transparent, we also identify our different types of crawlers. The complete list is as follows:
MSNBot Main web crawler (www.live.com)
MSNBot-Media Images & all other media (images.live.com)
MSNBot-NewsBlogs News and blogs (search.live.com/news)
MSNBot-Products Products & shopping (products.live.com)
MSNBot-Academic Academic search (academic.live.com)
But what about crawlers that aren’t so well-behaved? After all, anyone could call themselves ‘MSNBot’, and proceed to be as rude and aggressive as they like. Fortunately, there is a way you can catch these impersonators. Here is how it works:
By verifying the crawler’s identity, you can catch masquerading crawlers. When you do catch one, you can simply return an HTTP Error, thus blocking them from seeing your content.
We are constantly looking for your feedback to help improve our engine – please send it our way using this link.
Brent Hands, Program Manager, Live Search





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Yesterday, we released a small update to Live.com, intended to fix a number of bugs and improve the overall experience. While there aren't too many drastic changes that you can see, a number of items are worth calling out:
As always, we love hearing your feedback and want to hear your thoughts! You can email the entire team at livefb-at-microsoft-dot-com. Enjoy the new release!
Yesterday, we released a small update to Live.com, intended to fix a number of bugs and improve the overall experience. While there aren't too many drastic changes that you can see, a number of items are worth calling out:
As always, we love hearing your feedback and want to hear your thoughts! You can email the entire team at livefb-at-microsoft-dot-com. Enjoy the new release!