Who Is -- 65.54.188.142

I've been trying to find out who or what is spidering my web sites lately. Every time I try pinging or tracert on 65.54.188.142 I get an incomplete report. I'm at the point where I might try to block the IP in my robot.txt files on my sites becuase I wouldn't be surprised if it's a spam spider or not... (this IP is showing up in mass on a message board I run -- something like 3-15 incidents at a time)

But thena gain, if it's some new Search ENgine project or a reknown searchengine (googlebot, MSNBot, etc) with a hidden WhoIs, that would cause problems.

Is anyone else getitng a lot of hits from this IP lately?

In reply to:

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I've been trying to find out who or what is spidering my web sites lately. Every time I try pinging or tracert on 65.54.188.142 I get an incomplete report.

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The IP is allocated to Microsoft. For some reason, they generally don't bother setting up reverse DNS for their crawlers. Usually the access logs will have a user-agent string that indicates what it is, though - do you see "msnbot" or something similar?

Sometimes it shows up as such, sometimes it shows up as the IP alone.

It jsut got strange.