Increase in msnbot activty?

Anyone else see an increase in msnbot hits in first week of Oct-2004

[iblaine]

I'm seeing a few hits a second from the msnbot that started over the past couple days - anyone else seeing this activity? This is strange because the msnbot is even heavily spidering new URLs. With Yahoo and (especially) Google I wait weeks or months for more than a few dozen hits from a spider.

[Larryhat]

iblaine: For one 24 hour period, I found the following bot activity:

MSNbot: 50 files including robots.txt
Googlebot: 52 files, ditto.
Y-slurp: 29 files, ditto.

These ratios go up and down every day for me, but MSN does look busier than previously, yes. - Larry