01.16.10
Gemini version available ♊︎Lies and Denial of Service Attacks from Microsoft Bing
Summary: Microsoft-rewarded companies hail Bing while it’s said to be down; crucial Perl services go down after MSNBOT goes out of control
EVERY firm that provides US-only statistics on search engines seems to be showing Microsoft's Bing on the decline (for December 2009). There is one exception. comScore, which is a Microsoft partner [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7], contradicts the rest of the bunch, including Nielsen and Hitwise. This shows either that they are inaccurate or that there is a bias somewhere, favouring Microsoft at comScore (comScore is being paid by Microsoft and it cannot be trusted once its employees accept money from the very same company whose performance they assess in comparison to others’).
The only thing they all agree on is that Google continues to gain.
Nielsen, Hitwise, and comScore are all in agreement, so onlookers can perhaps declare it official now: Google had a good December. comScore, the member of the trio that most recently released its search market data, didn’t put Google up by a whole lot, though, and unlike the other firms, saw Bing gain ground.
The Bing-sponsored blog continues to show its bias and it says nothing about the fact that Microsoft is just buying some market share. Verizon is paid by Microsoft for example [1, 2]. So there are two issues here:
- Microsoft paid comScore, which is now contradicting Nielsen and Hitwise when it claims Microsoft gains
- Microsoft pays companies to remove Google as an option while blogs that it pays are claiming gains, describing that as success without mentioning those incentives (allegedly as much as $500,000,000 was paid to Verizon alone, in order to remove Google, despite customers’ preference)
It is worth adding that the same Microsoft-rewarded blog shares some Xbox 360 sales figures (US-only, even though this is not mentioned in the headline); these show Nintendo completely smashing Microsoft. Why not show global figures? Why not explicitly mention and emphasise that the figures refer only to one country? It is Microsoft’s home country where it battles against Japanese companies.
“MSNBOT must die!” says the Perl blog, which complains about Microsoft’s bad bots overwhelming the server due to shoddy code. Even CPAN was affected.
If you’ve suffered any problems accessing any of the sites, the databases, the CPAN mirror, etc from the CPAN Testers server last night, please direct your wrath at Microsoft. Last night the msnbot took out the CPAN Testers server with a dedicated denial of service attack. As a consequence measures are now being put in place to completely ban the msnbot from accessing at least the Reports site, and probably all the sites on the server.
Microsoft in their incompetent wisdom decided to unleash 20-30 bots every few seconds. I know this because I can see the IP addresses in the logs. The ones spotted within a few minutes of rebooting the server this morning to clear the processes were
Microsoft can’t even implement search right. An engine that’s estimated to handle just 3% of the world’s web search is causing far too much damage for far too little in return. █
ᶃ Gemini Space
This post is also available in 
Content is available under CC-BY-SA
williami said,
January 16, 2010 at 2:24 pm
Speaking of MSNBOT, Open Watcom (a free and enhanced version of the Watcom C, C++, and FORTRAN compilers), was affected too by MSNBOT:
http://cmeerw.org/blog/594.html
Evil M$…
Dennis Murczak said,
January 16, 2010 at 3:12 pm
I was wondering about those contradictions (yesterday I read about Bing declining, today about gains). Thanks for shining some light on this.
Roy Schestowitz Reply:
January 16th, 2010 at 3:39 pm
Money on the table changes everything, as Larry Lessig explained with many examples:
http://lessig.org/blog/2008/07/netroots_nation_keynote.html
Someone mailed me about this a few hours ago, saying:
Roy Schestowitz Reply:
January 16th, 2010 at 6:14 pm
Later he added: