jdMorgan - 11:30 pm on Sep 29, 2010 (gmt 0)

Bingbot/2.0 seems to be following msnbot/2.0b around, just warming up to take over the job on or about Friday (as scheduled). I don't see any bingbot/2,0 requests for robots.txt either, so I assume that it's basing its crawling on msnbot/2.0b's robots.txt fetches.

That makes sense, since bingbot/2.0 is probably identical or at least very similar to msnbot/2.0b, but without the "b" for beta. If it was a whole new crawler, they'd more likely have named it bingbot/1.0 -- there'd be no sense in carrying the "2.0" forward if it was new.

Jim