Why does AV crawl with Scooter AND Mercator

please explain

[jec2002]

Both bots work for AltaVista, right? Why does AV use two bots? Something's missing. Can anyone explain it for me? Thanks. -- Jim

[wilderness]

jec,
WEelcome to Webmaster World.
From what I understand Mercator is the pre-probe for Scooter. I could be mistkaen however?

There is a forum here for which includes AV:http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum1/
Perhaps somebody there would be closer to an answer.