Microsoft’s Search Crawler MSNBot To Be Renamed As Bingbot

Microsoft has been using MSNBot to crawl websites for its search engine.

Despite changing their search engine to Live Search and then to Bing, Microsoft did not rename the bot that crawls the web to collate information. In a blog post, the Bing team announced that 1st October onwards, the crawler will be renamed to Bingbot.

Though the users never complained since most of them weren’t privy to the information, webmasters have often mocked Microsoft for not renaming the crawler.

The new string will be:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0 +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)

Trivial but a much needed update.