Microsoft and Yahoo Search Deal Agreement

How will it affect search bot user agents?

[GaryK]

With the recent announcement that Microsoft will begin delivering search results for Yahoo, what effect, if any, do you think we might expect with regard to user agents for both Bing and Yahoo?

Might we see an end to the plethora of user agents from Yahoo and Inktomi?

Do you think we'll see the same kinds of user agents from Bing? As in, them continuing to sling dozens of new user agents and IP Addresses with no Reverse DNS every week?

Whatever happens I'm sure it'll be interesting.

[keyplyr]

Might we see an end to the plethora of user agents from Yahoo and Inktomi?

I certainly hope so. It's been said that Yahoo will save big from the deal by no longer crawling. Well geeze, I guess so. Slurp DL'd my 300 page site each and every day for over a year and I do have correct expiry tags and sitemap.xml.