Msnbot was a
web-crawling robot (type of
internet bot), deployed by
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...
to collect documents from the web to build a searchable index for the
MSN Search engine. It went into beta in 2004, and had full public release in 2005. The month of October 2010 saw the official retirement of msnbot from most active web crawling duties and its replacement by
bingbot.
As of September 2015, msnbot was still active from the
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...
and the
Bing webmaster help & howto documentation still indicated that msnbot was active (but that it would retire soon). The verification tool for bingbot
"Verify Bingbot"
Microsoft, 21/Mar/2014 previously did not recognise msnbot IP addresses. A test executed on 2016-02-22 resulted in a yes: "Verdict for IP address 157.55.39.150: Yes - this IP address is a verified Bingbot IP address. Name: msnbot-157-55-39-150.search.msn.com."
References
Internet bots
Web crawlers
Microsoft
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