Today, this website enjoyed its six-millionth hit. That hit was all about Amazingly Big things up in the Seattle area. I'm talking about the Pier 86 Grain Terminal and Microsoft. Let's take a look:
64.4.8.135 - - [13/Jul/2006:18:23:59 -0400] "GET /departures/Seattle/10/36views.html HTTP/1.0" 200 16858 "-" "msnbot/1.0 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"
This is the "msnbot" search crawler, scouting the internet for content to display in MSN Search results. It just crawled a page of my not-so-recently-updated travel photos, carefully confirming that they haven't changed.
(My opinions are mine, not my employers'.) Internet search geeks talk a lot about Google Search versus Yahoo search; they don't talk so much about MSN Search. But in one important regard in June 2006, MSN did even more to help internet users than Google did. So three cheers for MSN Search, a pocket of goodness buried in a big company, crawling the web so that they can show people of many nations some photos of huge grain silos.
I don't know how coherent that was. It's past my bedtime. Good night, wonderful internetty people of many nations. I hope you continue to find the Japanese ska reviews useful and/or inciteful.