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I'm getting several invalid requests from a "BingPreview" user agent. The complete user agent header is: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/534+ (KHTML, like Gecko) BingPreview/1.0b

The invalid requests seem to come from a bug in the HTML parser in the crawler, which ends up generating invalid URLs.

Is this user agent legit, really related to Bing? Or is it yet another fraud?

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According to ip2location.com, the IP (157.55.112.206) does belong to Microsoft... are they really using AppleWebKit?? – Mauricio Scheffer Mar 19 '12 at 17:50
Looks like you uncovered a new feature of Bing. – ZippyV Mar 19 '12 at 19:35

1 Answer

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They may be testing full page previews in search results similar to Google's. When you preview your page in Google you get a hit from one of their IP's. Bing right now just has a snippet of information and may be working on a full preview of the web page

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