Is the MSN search engine being used against Linux?

Tom Adelstein writes “Author’s experience with MSN bot and google research says MSN bot is bombarding open source sites. I kept wondering why my best read articles sunk lower on google and now I believe I know.

Over the last few weeks, I have noticed that a search on my name brings up articles written in 1999 and an obscure set of articles related to a music career that ended a couple of decades ago. I even have a spot on MSN entertainment for an album that hasn’t been available in years. I really like the Japanese tech articles from 1999.

So what’s going on? MSN Bot has become the preferred browser on some of my web sites creating links and generating hits. On sites I could control, I excluded it from my blog, for example, with a robots.txt file and entries. But as Tom Cruise said in the movie “A Few Good Men”: The hits just keep coming.

Of course this is about perception and no one really believes that MSN Bot would be used to manipulate what people read on web searches. Would they?

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