New MSNBot (msnbot/2.0b) from Live Search

Microsoft is getting ready to introduce its latest move against Google, an overhauled boot for its search engine. While the Redmond company is laboring to reportedly scrap the Live Search brand in favor of Kumo, with a transition of leadership as Qi Lu takes on the new role of president of the Online Services Group, the organic evolution of Live Search moves forward. In this regard, the latest product on the Live Search front is a new MSNBot.

“Live Search is committed to continuing to improve how we discover and crawl your content. In the coming weeks, we will be testing an update to MSNBot, which may show up as a new crawler name in your referrer logs. The new crawler user agent string will appear as: msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm). You’ll still see the current version msnbot/1.1 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm) as Live Search’s primary user agent,” Jeremiah Andrick, program manager, Live Search Webmaster Center, revealed.

Webmasters and web content owners will be the ones directly affected by Microsoft testing the new MSNBot. The new Live Search crawler will generate extra traffic as far as bots are concerned, but the software giant is promising that MSNBot/2.0b will tiptoe on websites and that it will not take a heavy tole on the resources available.

Qi Lu, the new president of the Online Services Group, indicated that one of the pitches that convinced him to join Microsoft was CEO Steve Ballmer's promise that the Redmond company had a strong focus on driving product quality.

“We intend to ensure that any robots exclusion protocol you are using is respected. As such, you don’t need to update your Robots.txt file. We plan on crawling at a slow speed during the tests with the updated version. When the new crawler replaces our current crawler, we will keep you up-to-date,” Andrick added.