What is a Bing Bot?

[Stewie studmuffin]

There have been times when I look at who is online and I sometimes see "Bing [Bot]" listed with the members.
So out of curiosity, who or what is a Bing Bot

[Anung Un Rama]

Bingbot is a web-crawling robot (type of internet virtual bot), deployed by Microsoft October 2010 to supply Bing. (internet search engine for lack of better term)

It collects documents from the web to build a searchable index for the Bing (search engine). It performs the same function as Google's Googlebot.

A typical user agent string for Bingbot is "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)".

This appears in the web server logs to tell the webmaster who is requesting a file. Each webmaster is able to use the included agent identifier, "bingbot", to disallow or allow access to their site (by default access is allowed).

If they don't want to grant access they can use the Robots Exclusion Standard to block it (relying on the assumed good behaviour of bingbot), or use other server specific means (relying on the web server to do the blocking).

Does that assist...

Anung

[Stewie studmuffin]

Thanks Anung! That definitely assists!
I was thinking that it had something to do with the Bing search engine but I wasn't sure what it was trying to accomplish.
At any rate, I've always said that one can learn something new every day around here!