ebay indexing?

[jake66]

i don't have a useragent, but i noticed this ip in my error log (denied access):

66.77.136.123

a lookup resulted to:
Qwest Communications Corporation QWEST-INET-12 (NET-66-77-0-0-1)
66.77.0.0 - 66.77.255.255
eBay Inc. QWEST-JSV-EBAYINC1 (NET-66-77-136-0-1)
66.77.136.0 - 66.77.136.255

can anyone elaborate on what / who this is?

[wilderness]

jake,
I've been seeing these for sometime.
They are quite inconsitent and generally only for a page or two before a long lapse in time (weeks or months) before returning.

On of the search engines negotiated a contract with eBay, unfortuantely, I cannot recall which one, nor did I save the press release.

Don

[jake66]

so it's a legitimate search bot? do you recall what they're searching for? (ebay maybe trying to see what non-ebay stores are doing to compete with them?)

[wilderness]

jake,
I would hardly refer to a page or two weeks and months apart as a crawl or spidering!

Should "we" wish to apply single page or item hits that never return again as bots as well?

eBay may in fact have a robot that is spidering pages!
Good luck finding a press release that states this or for that matter, locating anything else on the extensive help pages at eBay.

Don

[wilderness]

jake,
I provide this on June 17th:

[webmasterworld.com...]

The bot grabbed a single web page and the submission form on one site.
Then on another site; spidered six pages within four seconds.

I also have a reference to the same IP range from Jan 2004.
Where they visited the same page on the same site four times.

[jake66]

ah yes i believe i've seen that post before, but it didn't click at the time.

i wouldn't doubt that they're indexing so little at once... in hopes that most webmasters won't catch them and just gathering their bulk of data from thousands of different sites' single pages

just a nonsensical theory, nothing to base it on, of course :)