Heads up?

[Josk]

Hi,

I noticed that this critter visited yesterday -- anyone else seen anything like it?

IP: 195.27.148.77
UA: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0; MSIECrawler)
Whois: Altavista Deutschland GmbH

[Jaf]

I believe MSIE Crawler is the offline browser part of IE. If it's a single grab, it possibly means someone is bookmarking your page and taking an offline copy.

I once got plagued by MSIECrawler for months. At that time it was IE 4.0, and pretty virulent. It seems calmer in later versions of IE.

I had dozens of (mostly) Russian sites downloading robots.txt and nothing else. Drove me nuts, and there was nothing in my robots.txt to disallow further download. Messed my stats up completely :-(

Digging around suggested MSIECrawler might also have been related to the "Channels" that MS tried to put on the desktop a few years back. My guess is that somehow I got mentioned in a Russian Channel and these people were probably accessing my site without even knowing.

Isn't the web a wonderful thing ? :-)

[Josk]

It was more the av.de ip than the ua...but thats why it got caught by a script...

I just want to know the Altavista boyz want with my site then...