NetRatings / 64.124.34.46

Generating a lot of 404s

[pallo]

Over the last month or so I have been seeing some weird requests from 64.124.34.46, according to Whois "owned" by Nielsen / NetRatings.

The user agent string is "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT; T312461)" and it does accept and handle cookies, but does not request graphics or CSS.

It sometimes remove parameters from URLs (i.e. requesting foo.php instead of the linked foo.php?id=1), and also request URLs that does not exist on the server. It does not request robots.txt.

NetRatings have not responded to my e-mail asking what this is, and searching for the IP-address did not tell me anything.

Have anyone else seen this agent? And what could this be?

[wilderness]

A search at Google Groups will provide a wealth of info.

[pallo]

In that case I'm not searching in the right place or with the right keywords. I have tried searching for both that IP-address and info about Nielsen Netratings on several search engines (including Google Groups) without finding any good info on what this might be.

Knowing this is something from Nielsen/Netratings I'm sure this bot is trying to collect demographic data of some sort, but wonder if anyone know more about it (and/or is seeing bad requests from it).

[wilderness]

"Nielsen / NetRatings"

In addition I subscribe to an IAR newsletter of which provides a link to Nielsen's stats of interest. Some are quite interesting on various comparisons of internet data.