Bing Decision Engine News: New Crawler, Jingle Competition

Article by George Norman (Cybersecurity Editor)

on 21 Jul 2009

For those of you wondering what’s keeping the Microsoft developed would-be decision engine (not search engine) Bing busy, here are a couple of news that should hit the spot. The Bing development team has announced that a new Bing crawler will be unleashed onto the web at full throttle in the near future. You will be able to recognize the new Bing crawler by its user agent string, which is:
msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)

You might also see the previous crawler version as well, which as of now has become Bing’s primary user agent. Its string is:
msnbot/1.1 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)

Once work on the new crawler is complete, the Bing development team plans to launch it onto the web at full throttle. Rick DeJarnette, Bing Webmaster Center, explains: “We are busy working on our improved crawler and plan to ramp up its workload as we move toward the goal of putting it into full production. As a result, webmasters may begin seeing an increased amount of traffic from the new bot on their sites. We do not anticipate any problems related to our increasing emphasis on MSNBot 2, but the unexpected can’t always be avoided, no matter how hard you try!”

If you do run into any problems or if you have any feedback to provide, you can post your comments here.

Moving on to the second Bing-related piece of news, Microsoft has launched a new competition called the “Bing Jingle Contest.” To take part in the competition you must come up with a Bing Jingle an upload it to the Bing YouTube site by the end of the month (July 31st). If you win you will be rewarded with a $500 American Express gift cheque – the winner will be announced on the 5th of August.

Check out the Bing Jingle Contest rules here.


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