Whats msnBot looking for?
June 6th, 2006 by Jason Roe. Post is filed under Web Design & Development.
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I was having a look at my Apache log files today when I stumbled upon this snippet from Msnbot. It seems like the Msn bot was looking for something Google related. The site in question runs both Adsense, Analytics and has a Google sitemaps.
GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0
GET /misc/google/planting.gif HTTP/1.0
GET /misc/google/rakegirl.gif HTTP/1.0
GET /misc/xml.png HTTP/1.0
GET /misc/google/lilybasket.gif HTTP/1.0
GET /misc/gear/13.jpg HTTP/1.0
GET /misc/google/egg.gif HTTP/1.0
All requests where made from 65.55.246.48 around 06/Jun/ 10:03:06 +0100
I have had a look around on the web but I can’t find anything related. Has anyone seen this kind of pattern before?

June 6th, 2006 at 1:21 pm
What makes you think it is “looking” for anything? It looks to me like it is simply spidering.. If it was getting 404s on odd files then I would suspect it looking for something in particular
June 6th, 2006 at 1:44 pm
The site is fresh out of the box and never had any ref to any of the above files. So it looks like msn bot is \”looking\” for something. All of the files are 404.
June 6th, 2006 at 1:53 pm
You failed to mention that minor, yet important, detail
June 6th, 2006 at 1:54 pm
No.. I haven’t seen that.. however i’ll check out my logs today for sure.
Thanks for letting me know.
AdMan
June 6th, 2006 at 1:57 pm
I trimmed down the log file a bit to make it readable.