This one’s for free, Bing.com.
I was pretty happy the past year or so that someone was finally putting up a good fight against Google’s monopoly in search. We need competition. But now what? Bing is paying sites to block Google from indexing them? Really?
Fuck that.
As of today, I’m blocking Bing.
It’s not that I love Google’s monopoly that much (I think it’s great that they have competition), but how EVIL can you get? Paying companies to block a competitor’s searchbot? 1990s Microsoft playbook anyone? Not with my internet you’re not! Let the backlash begin.
I added a robots.txt file to my root folder (here), this is the code that I put in it:
User-agent: msnbot
Disallow: /
Hopefully that does the trick. Let me know if I have to change it.
Here’s a screenshot of Bing’s percentage in my traffic by the way, blocking them won’t hurt me much. Even if it did, I’d block them:
Now someone wants to register and set up blockbing.org with easy instructions or something?
I fully agree. Just heard the news on the radio coming home, went straight to my server (which hosts three domains) and added the robots.txt file. Then decided that wasn’t enough to satisfy my bloodlust, and ran this:
iptables -A INPUT -s 65.55.208.0/24 -j DROP
… so I don’t have to also trust Microsoft to police themselves. ‘Bye, evil bastards.
Comment by Mark — 11/23/2009 @ 7:23 pm
… then looked again at the web logs and expanded the range to 65.55.0.0/16.
Comment by Mark — 11/23/2009 @ 7:31 pm
way to be stick it to the man.
Google thanks you for your support.
Comment by jack — 11/24/2009 @ 11:04 am
Thanks for this code. A Q? The robots.txt, is to be put at “/” or at “/var/www”? Does it work (or is even needed) for ppl who isn´t running Apache?
Also. This shows that not all competitors are honest and not all companies can be trusted, yes we may need competition in web searches, but not M$. M$ doesn´t create competition, they destroy it with unethical and downright illegal tricks (Google never bribed or blocked competitors from showing results in their SE, or blocked email messages coming from competing email services. M$ OTOH did and still does all of that. Both what you just reported and stuff like that case where hotmail was proactivelly “vanishing” email messages coming from gmail accounts).
Comment by HTY — 12/21/2009 @ 10:20 pm
i think that Bing is not as good as Google. Google would still index new websites faster than Bing. Microsoft would still need a lot of catching to do with GoogleBot.
Comment by Kymm — 2/4/2010 @ 11:40 pm
I use both Bing and Google search engine and i dont see much difference in their search results. I use google for searching hard to find academic topics and Bing for general search.
Comment by Kim Lautner — 2/18/2010 @ 12:41 pm