What's up with MSN?

huge traffic surge/ now crawling?

[mfishy]

I have never submitted any sites to MSN, Look, Ink etc..

As of January 13 I noticed huge traffic to all of my sites from MSN. Are they now crawling the web like Google?

[redzone]

MSN has "no crawler" of their own. Their SERP's are comprised of:

1. Overture Sponsored listings
2. MSN Feature Listings (Hand reviewed by MSN Editors)
3. LookSmart Listings (In MSN Directory Listings)
4. Inktomi Listings (Inktomi provides the backfill behind LookSmart Listings)

You are most likely seeing a spike in traffic, from Inktomi, who did a major crawl effort, since October 2002.

[korkus2000]

related thread
[webmasterworld.com...]

[javascripter]

Actually,

I'm with you on this one. I too have several pages for a nationwide florist I designed a webpage for. I submitted a few single pages through Inktomi...(which charges for each individual page), as opposed to FAST which charges to index. The last few days, I've noticed several pages that I never submitted to MSN that are showing up all over the place. Mostly in the top 5 for my keywords. I'm very happy with it! I think Yahoo/Inktomi might be doing something to surprise us all. Watch out Google :)

Javascripter