MSNPTC revsited

[volatilegx]

In reference to this post [webmasterworld.com], I have some new information to post about "MSNPTC/1.0"

This spider belongs to Microsoft's MSN AdCenter. The IP addresses (according to them) are:

65.54.236.87
65.54.236.88
65.54.236.90

The purpose of the spider is analagous to the Google/Mediapartners Adsense spider.

[jdMorgan]

I eventually concluded that it was probably their "preview" crawler -- The agent that builds the thumbnail images of site home pages used in MSN search results if the search is done from within IE. I assumed (or read somewhere) that it was the "MSN Preview Technology Crawler" which replaced girafabot (which was rumored to have done the first thumbnail crawl used by MSN).

Of course, they may have re-delegated the PTC name since then...

Jim