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Crawling All Over Google
Posted by Rebecca Bolin on Thursday, November 11 @ 15:32:21 EST Contracts
This afternoon there has been outrage that Microsoft, while building its new search engine, has been crawling all over the web to gather data. This article suggests Microsoft is scraping the Google archives to find pages otherwise inaccesible. The author compares this information to "garbage" put out for all to see, raising no legal concerns.

Not exactly. As Microsoft is well aware, the Google terms of service ban commercial use and automatic queries, among other things. Remember the ruling in eBay v. Bidder's Edge, in which eBay blocked some web crawlers? Well, Microsoft certainly does. If Microsoft is using anything Google has done, they are doing so with permission; Micrsoft has certainly read robots.txt. So webpages are not like "garbage." They have terms of service--some better than others--and certainly Microsoft respected that. As for the irate webmasters, irritated by what they believe to be Microsoft bots, there's nothing to stop them from blocking the Microsoft web crawler.

 
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