MSN search "steeling" from Google?

[new_shoes]

"Jason Dowell over at WebProNews has written a piece questioning a tactic Microsoft might be using to beef up it's new search engine. He thinks they might be dipping into Google's results to supplement its own. Dowell likens it to leaving your garbage on the curb--anyone could conceivably go through it and take whatever is there for their own."

From slashdot [slashdot.org]

[kaled]

The article suggests that MS may be using the google site: search as a source of urls for spidering. Sounds plausible, but as soon as Google spot it, they can close the door.

Kaled.

[Rick_M]

MSNdude already responded to the allegation:

[webmasterworld.com...]

Also regarding relevance, there has been some speculation on some online forums about MSNBot using Google search result pages to build our index. Let us set the record straight – that is simply not true. We respect robots.txt and as a result we will not crawl Google’s search result pages.

[edited by: Rick_M at 1:38 am (utc) on Nov. 12, 2004]

[olias]

<edit>too slow!</edit>

[Trax]

Msn would be really stupid if they'd try to do such a thing.
I doubt they do anything like that.

[billygg]

yea, thats pretty ballzy if they did, cause im sure they would figure google would find that out.

[kaled]

To me, the question is "Is there anyone at MS smart enough to think of this?" rather than "Is there anyone slimy enough to authorize it?"

We know the answer to the latter is YES, but as for the former.....

Kaled.

[bloke in a box]

Purely out of interest, is there any legal reason why you couldn't crawl googles (or any other SE) search results?

[Imaster]

Don't you think it would be much more easier for MSN to simply crawl the sites, rather than querying the Google database with "site:sitename.com". Plus, Google shows only 1000 results, of what use could that be?

I think it is pure speculation!

[SlyOldDog]

Yes. Why would MSN do that? They can just crawl from the home page and follow the links.

What a daft theory.