I have [Bing]Preview in my block list so it got nothing.

That's too bad. Might be why...

visitors from Bing are rare

keyplyr I don't think so.

This is the first visit from BingPreview and OK if this was an actual human using their feature then I might or might not have missed the visit but visitors from Bing are rare because
1. the content of my sites is (by coincidence) more geared towards users who will 'google' for it
2. Bing's indexing of my sites is deplorable (what's not indexed can't be found)

For instance, a few weeks ago I added a new page to one of my sites; G read it a day or so later and several times since and has sent visitors to it, B still has to 'find' it though it read the page from where it's linked to several times (go figure)

My point was (and is) that if you block the Bing Preview utility, then in any given Bing SERP, yours will likely be the only one without that nice little presentation to lure visitors in.

Absolutely right and could also be one of the few to get a visit instead of users flipping through previews ;o)

... and, just like Google Preview, they are not a robot and therefore don't have to follow directives such as "stay the ### out of my .js files".

I'm worried that Bing Preview is going to develop a monomania, like the bingbot's insatiable appetite for robots.txt files. Every day* they stop by my art studio's site and collect a fresh Preview of the front page. No referer, just the Preview. Sure, it's a pretty page, but haven't they noticed that it never changes?


* For this site, doing anything once a day counts as blazing traffic. They're smaller than I am by about two orders of magnitude, which you would have thought is mathematically impossible.

Follow-up: At the time I posted the above, I'd overlooked one slightly crucial detail. It's not a preview.

That is: G### preview picks up the entire page-- stylesheets, images, javascript, the works. BingPreview picks up exactly two things: html and javascript.

207.46.204.170 - - [11/Feb/2012:16:22:37 -0800] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 1323 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/534+ (KHTML, like Gecko) BingPreview/1.0b"  
207.46.204.170 - - [11/Feb/2012:16:22:38 -0800] "GET /piwik/piwik.js HTTP/1.1" 403 1027 "http://example.org/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/534+ (KHTML, like Gecko) BingPreview/1.0b"

And that was all she wrote. What's the sense in previewing a page if all you collect is the html? Is it another of those tests to see if a different name is served the same content?

Staffa, are you sure about the double spaces? Outside of query strings, my logs distinguish pretty clearly between spaces and plusses. I can tell by-- coincidentally-- the plainclothes MSNbots, which routinely insert pairs of spaces. Those come through as two consecutive spaces; here I'm seeing "534+" followed by a space.

An ongoing mystery is that, as far as I can tell, BingPreview (no space) has never visited my own site. But every day, rain or shine, they come knocking at the art studio's door.

[edited by: tedster at 12:03 am (utc) on Apr 29, 2013]
[edit reason] switch to example.org [/edit]

BingPreview picks up exactly two things: html and javascript.

*and* links to your site, contact info, local listing pages, etc - depending on the page listed. I find this very valuable and get triple digit daily traffic from Bing.

It's not enough that we are required to these many varitions of Bing, and yet they they crawl WITHOUT properly identifying themsselves. . . .

and used malformed UA's to boot.

157.55.112.235 - - [16/Feb/2012:01:35:27 +0000] "GET /publct/MyPage.html HTTP/1.1" 200 8373 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1;
SV1;
.NET CLR 1.1.4325;
.NET CLR 2.0.50727;
.NET CLR 3.0.04506.648)"

I've placed line-breaks after the double spaces so the forum would display them.

*and* links to your site, contact info, local listing pages, etc

Not for this site they don't ;) because none of that stuff exists.

I just went through and scooped up the past week's logs. Bing Preview has stopped by 20 times this month, including 5 times in the past 4 days. For a page that hasn't changed since November, gets about two human visitors a month, and contains approximately 20 words of text, that seems excessive.

I don't keep raw logs for this site so I don't know if they have ever collected the images which are the substance of the page.

Tangential question: If you were not actively looking for them, would you ever know that Bing search has right-margin popups? I was looking to see if they'd swiped g###'s Preview idea, and got "More About This Site" instead. Huh.

I only allow bot UAs for bot IPs. I'm seeing a fair number of ordinary browser UAs on bot IPs - all blocked. Last month there were 29 bingpreview, again all blocked.

Lucy - What I'm not seeing here (UK) is any preview on the SERPS. I thought this might be due to having JS turned off but turning it on made no difference. Not even seeing a More... link.

The "more on this page" seems to be random. I did a search that was intended to bring up my art studio's page-- which it did-- but only about 2/3 of the resulting pages had a "more". (The studio didn't.) And it's hiding, exactly like g### Previews only more so. You have to move your mouse to the right vicinity for the little arrow to show up.

I've just tried www.bing.co.uk --which didn't fool them, since they jumped over to www.bing.com but with the "only from United Kingdom" option. Taking this option I searched for :: cough, cough :: "serpent" off the top of my head. If you mouse-hover over any search result, a wee right-pointing arrow materializes next to the text. That arrow is the "more on this page" link. (Bad wording, incidentally: "more on" could mean either "more about..." or "more from...")

But no, definitely not any kind of visual preview.

As an aside, I got an msnbot hit today whihch prompted me to review a short section of MS IPs.

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

Obviously not a good "production" bot.

I reviewed IPs from 157.56.192/18 (hit came from 157.56.229.nn)

157.56.229.7 - 157.56.229.52
157.56.229.71 - 157.56.229.116
157.56.229.138 - 157.56.229.183
157.56.229.202 - 157.56.229.247

No other bots found in the range.

This is the first time I've seen that IP range used; previous check last November showed no bots on the range, although a few on the lower ranges below 80.