[COLUG] How to boycott Microsoft (or at least MSN search)

[Scott Merrill]

Joshua Kramer said:
> So here's what I have to say: from now on, the Microsoft search
> bot will be specifically excluded from my web sites via the
> robots.txt file. The following entry should accomplish this:
>
> User-agent: msnbot/*
> Disallow: /
>
> What that means is that I won't allow Microsoft's search engine
> to index my websites. Google can, yahoo can... but Microsoft
> can't. It's the website owner's version of an invisible boycott.
> And if enough people do it, the Microsoft search engine will find
> itself unable to search large segments of the web. And that means
> that people who notice this won't want to search using
> Microsoft's search engine.

More likely Microsoft will either start using alternate user-agent strings
for their bots or simply start ignoring the robots.txt altogether.