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Back on June 18, 2009, Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, admitted they waited too long to really get into the search market. "We had all these people doing search research, but we had no business model in mind," said Ballmer. "So we were slow to move and slower to invest in it. We should have started earlier."  - Source Information Week

So, since Ballmer admitted Microsoft was slow about getting into the search market, will anyone from the Bing team admit that MSNBot is slower than Googlebot? Last week I asked if the reason Bing cannot keep up with Google was because of their crawling process. I thought maybe I would get an answer from Bing since I sent them a direct message via Twitter, but I guess not. Maybe their Twitter feed crawling is also slow? Hehe. Anyway, this is a serious and huge limitation for Bing and I hope a plan has been put into place. It would be nice to hear what that plan consist of.

MSNBot has been around since June 2003. According to the UserAgent in the web logs, the current version is 1.1 or 2.0 beta:

msnbot/1.1 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)

AND

msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)

Seriously? In the past 6 years they still have not even officially released a 2.0 version? You got to be kidding me! I guess at least they have a beta, but it still crawls slower than Googlebot. Even Googlebot is version 2.1, though it has been around much longer than MSNBot, but they obviously have it working right.

When will MSNBot 2.0 be released. Will there be a BingBot? Is Microsoft hiring developers for MSNBot? If so, where do I apply???