New Altavista-spider?

testing new scooter and mercator or what else?

[oLeon]

got this #UA
Sc2_Merc_resh_37_1_B-1.0
TSc_Merc_resh_37_2_C-1.0
Tv33_Merc_resh_26_1_B-1.0
Tv34_Merc_resh_26_2_B-1.0
Tv35_Merc_resh_31_1_B-1.0
Tv36_Merc_resh_31_2_B-1.0

any ideas about these spiders?
they spidered pages which only were submitted to altavista!

[Machiavelli]

Altavista seems to be breeding new user-agents at the moment. I think I must have seen over 50 new user-agents from them in the past three months. I think that they may be trying to cloak-bust all the sites who cloak on user-agent alone. Search this site for "Mercator" or some-such and you'll see various other people's AV visitors.

[oLeon]

I got also a lot of variations of mercator and scooter, and I agree: AV seems to want locking out all these UA-cloaker.

Whether it will be a race between the engine and the cloakers, we`ll see.

[msgraph]

Have you checked out this disc.?

[webmasterworld.com...]

If you have followed how Mercator spiders your site it pretty much matches what is described in this bit of info.

IMHO, Mercator has nothing to do at this moment in how Altavista is indexing their current results. They are probably testing out some new spidering techniques and sorting methods they want to implement in the future.

[Marcia]

A new page just turned up yesterday in AV results from December (nicely), the version prior to changing it Christmas weekend. While trying to back-track and change it back, this showed up:

209.73.164.126 - - [17/Feb/2001:02:15:52 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 404 204 "-" "Mercator-Scrub-1.1"
209.73.164.126 - - [17/Feb/2001:02:15:52 -0500] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 4285 "-" "Mercator-Scrub-1.1"

Also, at a site that's been in for a while, same one showed up - only one remote inside page, totally random:

209.73.164.126 - - [17/Feb/2001:09:18:24 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 404 204 "-" "Mercator-Scrub-1.1"
209.73.164.126 - - [17/Feb/2001:09:18:24 -0500] "GET /Graphics/Tiles/corduroy/ HTTP/1.0" 200 5329 "-" "Mercator-Scrub-1.1"

I generally don't pay close attention, but I've not seen this one before, and this struck me as odd - just the one odd page.

[JuniorHarris]

<repost from other thread [webmasterworld.com]>

I'm guessing AV parked Scooter for a couple of months, either to tune it and/or in anticipation of LookSmart. Now it appears all those long lost submitted URLs are now being requested and indexed
I keep very detailed logs of all submissions as well as detailed logs of all site activity. After reviewing all logs etc, I can safely say (93.2% certain Regis), that AV is processing a backlog of URL submissions since early December.

The recent index update on AV contains pages that were submitted DEC-4 thru DEC-6 (using a web multi-submission tool). Scooter (kalyan) accessed/indexed those pages (other then the instant verify), on FEB-1 and FEB-2. These pages are now in the current index. I have other URLs in the queue so I should be able to follow up with this theory. The next by date submission was JAN-7.

[cfhoney]

Does anyone know anything about Scooter-Jellyfish1?
He's been here the last 2 days. But I've never seen him before.