Don't boycott MSNBOT
I received a note urging me to use the robots.txt mechanism to prevent Microsoft's search engine from indexing my site. My response is that creating a search engine is a virtuous and charitable thing, and an ease to the people.
The impulse to decide which search engines are legitimate based on who owns them seems to me less like an ordinary boycott and more like, and closer to, a pattern of subdividing the net into small parts which can't talk to each other. "A strange game -- the only way to win is not to play."
