I checked my web logs, and I’ve been getting a truly massive amount of hits from bots at msn.com. And you know it must be Microsoft, because they’re really bad at spidering the site, and they always pick up the boring crap without hitting any of the interesting pages.

Anyway, it turns out Microsoft is previewing a new search engine which, when I tried it, just complained about being unable to service my request. Apparently, it’s modelled after Google’s simplistic interface - following on from Microsoft’s grant tradition of copying others’ success: “all the aethestics, none of the uptime”…