I know that mercator is a spider of altavista, but what does it do? my sites are not indexed in altavista yet, will it help me to get included or should I block it (it downloads a lot from my sites!)?
jdMorgan
2:48 am on Dec 12, 2002 (gmt 0)
hhff,
I think it has something to do with new sites or new pages. IIRC, I've only seeb Mercator when I've used the Submit function at AV.
Jim
ulstrup
7:03 pm on Dec 13, 2002 (gmt 0)
When Mercator first showed up in logs - some years ago - there was a big fuzz as a lot of people worried about Mercator being "AV cloaking police", the last speculations about Mercator is that it is some kind of test spider (haven't looked into this issue for years). I still get a few visits every day from Mercator and it does'nt seem to do no good or no bad...
Finder
7:12 pm on Dec 13, 2002 (gmt 0)
Mercator is the only spider I've ever seen take gzipped tar files. It prompted me to move those files into an excluded directory to keep it from hogging bandwidth.
