microsoft is going head to head with Google in an attempt to kill our long time best friend when we're looking for information. the likely strategy is to build a sub-standard search engine and integrate it into windows so the lemmings of the world will just use that and just stop with any others.

now if this weren't microsoft, i'd be on their side. gods know, this is a free system, and the company with the best technology should win -- but that's just it. microsoft doesn't play by those rules, they play to kill the competition, and in so doing make my life harder. so i'm doing what i can to put a wrench in their plans:

a search engine's backbone is based on it's spider results. if microsoft's spiders read your site, it gets indexed on their servers and this affects the rankings of all their other sites. the algorithms they use for this are designed to increase the quality of search results, so depriving them of it will contribute to making their search engine less useful.

so i block them. any connection to my server from a microsoft ip is stopped at the network level. that way, even if they follow a link to my site from elsewhere, they won't see my site and won't be able to index it. for those curious, here are the ips:

• 207.31.251.140
• 207.46.98.0/24
• 65.54.188.0/24
• 81.2.209.64

i'm watching their spiders trying to get through my firewall as i write this. the bastards are relentless... it's kinda entertaining

now you might say that google's just another big corporation, and you'd be right. but if you think about it, google has never done anything to screw you. in fact, it's gone out of its way to make your life good and to be useful. microsoft however has done very much the opposite. i offer my geeky readers the above ips so that they might do the same.