This message archived at: http://www.politechbot.com/2004/07/06/boycott-msn-search/ -------- Original Message -------- Subject: [PoliTech] A Finger in the Eye of Microsoft Date: Tue, 6 Jul 2004 00:59:57 -0500 From: Matthew Hunter <matthew@private> To: Declan McCullagh <declan@private> I thought this might interest some of the people on PoliTech. ----- If you're a techie, like me, you've probably noticed that Microsoft has been making a lot of noise about competing with Google these days. Yahoo, too, has been active. In general, the search engine space is starting to heat up again after several years of google-dominance. And if you're running a website, for yourself or for someone else, you've probably seen the Microsoft search bot in your server logs. At least, you have if you pay attention to your server logs and Microsoft can find your site yet. Now, don't get me wrong, competition is a good thing... but competition from Microsoft is not. We all know that competition from Microsoft involves things like "cutting off their air supply" and aggressively wielding their desktop muscle and huge cash reserves to get a foothold in the new market. Google's an established player, but it's facing a fair amount of competition and the current IPO can perhaps be taken as a hint that they are vulnerable -- that is, sufficiently in need of cash that it might affect their ability to respond to new players. So it looks like Microsoft is trying to extend its overbearing self into the search engine space, and the target at the top of the list is Google. Now, as a Linux user, I understand two things about this situation: first, Microsoft is not my friend; and second, Google has been a very good friend. So here's what I have to say: from now on, the Microsoft search bot will be specifically excluded from my web sites via the robots.txt file. The following entry should accomplish this: User-agent: msnbot/* Disallow: / What that means is that I won't allow Microsoft's search engine to index my websites. Google can, yahoo can... but Microsoft can't. It's the website owner's version of an invisible boycott. And if enough people do it, the Microsoft search engine will find itself unable to search large segments of the web. And that means that people who notice this won't want to search using Microsoft's search engine. ----- The full article is on my weblog, here: http://matthew.infodancer.org/weblog/entry/103.jsp -- Matthew Hunter (matthew@private) Public Key: http://matthew.infodancer.org/public_key.txt Homepage: http://matthew.infodancer.org/index.jsp Politics: http://www.triggerfinger.org/weblog/index.jsp _______________________________________________ Politech mailing list Archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Moderated by Declan McCullagh (http://www.mccullagh.org/)
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