Microsoft contacting me

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Janese about cmot died on April 17th 2011

Fri, 20.05.2011 12:46

Hey, youre the goto expret. T hanks for hanging out here.

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Dear Diana. What sad news I go t today with your email to me. I personally knew Adrian as a really nice person, he [...]

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Dear Diana We actually have n ever met but please neverthele ss receive my condolences. I h ave known Adrian for man [...]

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Oh no! It is so sad to read th is. I always liked Adrian's bl og and found it one of the mos t valuable on Planet Debian...

Wednesday, October 1. 2008

Microsoft contacting me

I recently received an email from Amy Wilcox from Murphy & Associates, representing Microsoft (the mail was sent from a Microsoft address, via smtp.microsoft.com, so it appears to be genuine.) They asked me to remove the ban for Microsoft search from my robots.txt because “customers complained they couldn't find my site”
First, cowards, they (the people complaining to MS) should have contacted me directly. I don't exactly hide my email address. Second: apparently they still did know about my site, else they wouldn't have complained to MS. In any case, I responded that the removal of this robots.txt entry would be a commercial opportunity for me if they cared to take me up on this offer. I will, of course, amend the omission of not putting a robots.txt on my new blog.fortytwo.ch domain...

Posted by Adrian von Bidder in Interesting at 09:30 | Comments (6) | Trackbacks (0)

< 42 | Geeks and the other sex? >

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So...Microsoft sent its lawyers to tell you to un-ban their search engine crawler? Since when did companies get to dictate what went into people's robots.txt?

#1 Gryc Ueusp on 2008-10-01 23:20 (Reply)

Did their search crawler misbehave, or do you just dislike Microsoft? If the latter, keep in mind that people using Microsoft's search engine would likely benefit from finding your site, starting to learn something about Free Software, and eventually figuring out that they want to go in a different direction.

#2 Anonymous on 2008-10-02 10:08 (Reply)

People using MS' search engine shouldn't use a non-MS search engine instead (so the answer to your question is: the latter.) Loswering the usability of their engine by excluding results is the strategy (yes, I'm aware of the HUGE impact I'm having here ;-)

#2.1 Adrian von Bidder on 2008-10-02 12:10 (Reply)

Cowards? Their customer just reported a bug to Microsoft. They are not supposed to know that you banned Microsoft in your robots.txt file...

#3 Mathieu on 2008-10-02 17:03 (Reply)

I don't think anybody complained. It looks like M$ is sending these letters to people who have them filtered. Many people will just get scared about receiving letters from a layer and comply.

#4 Anonymous 2 on 2008-10-02 22:15 (Reply)

While I don't like MS any better than you, I don't think this is the case: It doesn't say lawyer anywhere in the letter. While the "Murphy & Associates" bit (that comes from the From header) does indeed sound lawyer-ish, she only claims the title Web Analyst in her signature. Also, if the intent was bullying, I'd expect a stronger worded letter than the very polite one I've received.

#4.1 Adrian von Bidder on 2008-10-03 11:27 (Reply)

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