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MSRBOT

Posted by joy

MSRBot is apparently a new bot from Microsoft Research. However, the “version” of MSRbot that I was seeing last night came from 209.133.64.220, which isn’t an obvious Microsoft IP address.

In addition the user agent field only stated:

Agent: MSRBOT

Perhaps if I was Microsoft, I’d publish the IP address the real bot is supposed to crawl from.

Update: 10/5/06: MSRBOT does belong to Microsoft Research - they placed a URL for more information in the updated MSRBOT user agent string http://research.microsoft.com/research/sv/msrbot/.

Technorati Tags: Web, robot, crawler, bad bot, Microsoft

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 29th, 2006 at 7:07 am and is filed under Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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5 Responses to “MSRBOT”

bruce Says:
August 31st, 2006 at 6:23 pm
A bot identified as ‘MSRBOT’ has been hammering my site from the 209.133. range. I can’t imagine that it’s legitimately from Microsoft, unless they are conducting research from San Jose…
joy Says:
September 2nd, 2006 at 12:29 pm
I don’t believe it’s Microsoft running this particular bot.
James Says:
September 3rd, 2006 at 7:43 am
I also got a total crawl from MSRBOT at 209.133.64.221. It was preceded by a short look at robots.txt by “msnbot/1.0 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)” so it may be legit though I can not see why they are using a block of addresses out of San Jose. The msnbot crawls my site regularly as it is. I am inclined to block this one until they cough up a good reason for the additional bandwidth they are taking. I have had a few that were resistant to a robots.txt ban and had to be blocked at the firewall. MSNBOT has not always been a good netizen either.
Michael Hampton Says:
September 19th, 2006 at 9:16 am
The research group running “MSRBOT” is apparently based in Silicon Valley, rather than Redmond…
Freesitebuilder Says:
March 22nd, 2007 at 10:06 am
I’ve had this too, using 209.133.64.213, but it shows the referrer as http://blogger.com

The whois gave me this:

Search results for: 209.133.64.213
```
OrgName:    Abovenet Communications, Inc
OrgID:      ABVE
Address:    360 Hamilton Ave
City:       White Plains
StateProv:  NY
PostalCode: 10601
Country:    US

ReferralServer: rwhois://rwhois.above.net:4321
```
So if it is the MS research bot, why does it say Blogger?