Bingbot
Encyclopedia
bingbot is a web-crawling robot (type of internet bot
Internet bot
Internet bots, also known as web robots, WWW robots or simply bots, are software applications that run automated tasks over the Internet. Typically, bots perform tasks that are both simple and structurally repetitive, at a much higher rate than would be possible for a human alone...

), deployed by Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

 to supply Bing (search engine). It collects documents from the web to build a searchable index for the Bing (search engine). It replaced msnbot
Msnbot
msnbot was a web-crawling robot , deployed by Microsoft 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 and its replacement by...

 as the main Bing Crawler on October 2010.

A typical user agent
User agent
In computing, a user agent is a client application implementing a network protocol used in communications within a client–server distributed computing system...

 string for bingbot is " Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)". This appears in the web server
Web server
Web server can refer to either the hardware or the software that helps to deliver content that can be accessed through the Internet....

 logs to tell the webmaster
Webmaster
A webmaster , also called a web architect, web developer, site author, or website administrator is a person responsible for maintaining one or many websites...

 who is requesting a file. Each webmaster is able to use the included agent identifier, "bingbot", to disallow or allow access to their site (by default access is allowed). If they don't want to grant access they can use the Robots Exclusion Standard
Robots Exclusion Standard
The Robot Exclusion Standard, also known as the Robots Exclusion Protocol or robots.txt protocol, is a convention to prevent cooperating web crawlers and other web robots from accessing all or part of a website which is otherwise publicly viewable. Robots are often used by search engines to...

to block it (relying on the assumed good behaviour of bingbot), or use other server specific means (relying on the web server to do the blocking).
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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