Killing Live.com Bot
I've had it. The live.com spambot, aka msnbot, is officially not welcome either here or at Social Alerter. Why? The bot is still referral spamming. How much? 100% of my live.com referrals at Social Alerter are actually the bot's spam. Granted the absolute number of hits is only in the low tens, but it is not right and such behavior is no longer welcome. And no, the constant lies that this behavior has stopped do not help.
For a background on this, start here, then read this post, and close off with the follow up.
Bye, bye. I hope to see you never.
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April 6th, 2008 at 3:13 am
I blocked it a few months ago… feels good. My stats are a lot cleaner!
April 19th, 2008 at 1:37 pm
[...] MSNbot, when will you ever learn? I won’t rehash the story that lead me to blocking MSN’s referral-spamming bot, and that seems to have worked a bit. The problem is that the referral spam is still coming in! [...]
June 22nd, 2008 at 5:09 am
The strange thing is still, that Google has the best results over all, but I have never had referrer spam from that SE. Neither have I had from Yahoo. So I think that MSN has a broken BOT still. Or they are not clever enough to code a “straight” BOT.
Even if I am climbing up on the MSN, this search engine still have some issues, that I find amazing, the team behind do not realize. Besides from the very precise results from Google, it is also very user friendly, because it is minimalistic. MSN has a lot of garbage on their site, Google has not. I always stick to Google, even if they better their results on MSN, because of this. And I bet a lot of other people will do too.
June 22nd, 2008 at 9:05 am
Hi Rune
I agree that the MSN bot is crap, and msn.com is not that great. However, live.com is a very nicely designed site, and it uses the same algo as msn.com. I like live.com’s design much more than Google’s but the results are… sigh.
At the end of the day, it’s a combination of brand power and good algos. The Live results may not be as good as Google’s, but it’s actually not that far off overall - there are controlled experiments to show this. Google’s brand affects the perception of their relevance quite a bit!
July 18th, 2008 at 5:47 pm
Hello, Pierre,
Well, I agree that Live seems interesting. Not overloaded with Flashes and garbage. Very nice…
Didn’t know the page untill you mentioned it, but I will do some tests of it - thanks for the link.