Mediabot coming through Yahoo! Proxy

[volatilegx]

Can anybody confirm that this is a valid Mediabot user agent?

05/02/06 10:15:44 BST
IP: 66.94.237.140
Host: proxy1.search.scd.yahoo.net
UA: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 4.0), Mediapartners-Google/2.1

05/02/06 10:15:44 BST
IP: 66.94.237.141
Host: proxy2.search.scd.yahoo.net
UA: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 4.0), Mediapartners-Google/2.1

[Brett_Tabke]

hmmm. someone at the hoo have a little fun?

[Pfui]

Spidertrack.org [spidertrack.org] shows the same curious combination (hit dates unclear). Scroll down to the teal+yellow highlighted text on this cached page [72.14.207.104], or more conveniently --

IP: 66.94.237.140
Host: proxy1.search.scd.yahoo.net
UA: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 4.0), Mediapartners-Google/2.1

IP: 66.94.237.141
Host: proxy2.search.scd.yahoo.net
UA: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 4.0), Mediapartners-Google/2.1

IP: 66.94.237.142
Host: proxy3.search.scd.yahoo.net
UA: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 4.0), Mediapartners-Google/2.1

(Deja vu all over again:)

[activeco]

<speculation>

Yahoo is checking if someone hides Adsense code from them.
If so, do they prefer non-adsense pages in their organic search?

[volatilegx]

Want my guess? It's a proxy that somebody figured out how to use, and they are trying to decloak pages.

[activeco]

Hm, it seemed it was an enigma in the past too:

[webmasterworld.com...]
[webmasterworld.com...]
[webmasterworld.com...]
[webmasterworld.com...]
[webmasterworld.com...]
[webmasterworld.com...]

[Brett_Tabke]

Sure that isn't bablefish?

[activeco]

Done some research.
All the subdomains before "search.scd.yahoo.*" are tied to different "departments" like "bff*" is babelfish (try [bff1.search.scd.yahoo.com...] ), "a*" is Alltheweb (try [a1.search.scd.yahoo.com...] ), etc.

It looks like subdomain "scd" is connected with Yahoo Search Web Services, which are explained here:
[pcquest.com...]

It could also be that general public who use YS Web Services, could manipulate it. E.g.:
[api.search.yahoo.com...]

Note this line: "ws02.search.scd.yahoo.com compressed/chunked..."
ws=webServer?

So it is possible that proxy1/2/3 (there are three of them) is used in some way by the public too.

[activeco]

P.S.

Pardon me for not quoting the WebmasterWorld results first regarding YSWS, such as [webmasterworld.com...] .

The link above from PCQuest was very neat explanation.