incrediBILL - 9:47 pm on Sep 30, 2010 (gmt 0)

They did a half-baked job on switching to Bingbot IMO because the full trip DNS verification still same MSNBOT!

Example:

207.46.13.42 - "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0 +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)" Rev DNS of 207.46.195.106 is msnbot-207-46-195-106.search.msn.com.

How confusing is that?

Ill thought out, ill conceived, making changes for no other purpose than branding, messing with webmasters making them waste time on meaningless updates.

Then you still have them using MSNBOT as the name in reverse DNS so you're still checking for MSNBOT and BINGBOT together!

What a big fat hairy mess for no particular reason and the only thing I'm thankful for is we didn't go down this same path with a Livebot in the middle of it all!

The only problem with jdMorgan's suggest of MicrosoftBot, which I like, is that the entire internet search unit isn't poised to easily sell if the crawler identifies itself as either Microsoft or even MSN for that matter.

Just a thought ;)