Microsoft: Better to ask forgiveness than permission philosophy makes its way to Live
by Randall McCarley
December 5th, 2007
Yesterday, Microsoft announced corrections to their new cloaking-detector bot that was causing havoc with web stats and ad earnings.
While many blogs are covering this announcement - hit tip to Donna for breaking the story - most are viewing this announcement as a positive step… or at least being diplomatic about accusing Microsoft of any wrongdoing.
Screw that.
Microsoft knew what their program was doing and was, at best, slow to respond. This “better to ask forgiveness” philosophy is what led Microsoft’s browser and operating system departments into anti-trust lawsuits. And now it seems the culture of those departments has spilled over to search.
The Live team should know better than to mess with webmasters earnings. That is unjustifiable. By keeping the cloak of secrecy around them instead of just acknowledging what was going on they prolonged the damage being caused.
I wish Microsoft had come forward earlier. I wonder if they would have come forward at all without significant kicking and screaming in the blogosphere and social media channels.
It also seems odd to me they used the regular Live IP for this test instead of something else. I don’t see what harm would have been done to use a different domain that could have been blocked without forcing webmasters and SEOs to choose between having their stats messed up or getting traffic from Live.
Finally, I have to wonder at the irony of spamming websites to detect spam.
The positive side of this story is that Microsoft seems to have corrected the shortcomings of this program so webmasters will see just tiny amounts of referral spam instead of the heaps that were dumped on them before. And there is not to be any more messing with Adsense which is probably more important. I guess it is better late than never.
I’m sure the Live team gathered important information that will help them improve their search results which is great. Google needs more competition.
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December 12th, 2007 at 1:02 pm
And sadly enough, I’m just not surprised by this in the least bit. You nailed it in regards to the secretive nature in the culture of their teams. But I know that they see how bad their trailing in the area of search, and they know they have proven methodologies at their disposal to help them catch up in this race. Ethical or not, they’ll use these techniques. Ethics doesn’t inflate stock.