[vox] [fwd] Is the MSN search engine being used in the battle to kill Linux?

[Bill Kendrick]

Wow, this is bizarre.

----- Forwarded message from Tom Adelstein <tadelste at charter.net> -----

Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2004 13:02:07 -0500
From: Tom Adelstein <tadelste at charter.net>
Subject: [school-discuss] LXer: Is the MSN search engine being used in the battle to kill Linux?


http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/23328/index.html

Hello,

I could not track the source of old content showing up at the top of
google searches on my name. According to the number of hits I
generate, I have a significant mind share on Google. Finally, we
tracked down the problem and found that MSNbot was hammering and
multiplying links old and irrelevant content, pushing that above
recent articles about Linux in Government, case studies, etc.

I also found other open source advocates on the web trying to find out
why they couldn't stop MSNbot using a standard robots.txt directive in
the root directory of their web sites. Some of the complaints related
to increased fees for bandwidth.

In this article, I discuss the issue. I will also post the fix we
discovered by accident. BTW, a standard redirect will not work.

I'm not very pleased to discover Microsoft is manipulating the content
on the Internet.

Tom Adelstein

----- End forwarded message -----

-bill!