Though I am not allowed to say exactly when or remotely where, I will be spending some quality time with members of the Google and Microsoft Live Webmaster Central teams this weekend.
Somewhere in America the Webmaster Central teams from Google and Microsoft Live will face each other head to head in quasi-athletic competition. The rival search-squads will be squaring off in public against each other in one of the few forums their extraordinary NDA’s don’t overtly restrict; on a curling rink. Yes, you read that right, a curling rink. Geeks on ice with brooms, rings and rocks. The event is obviously going to be sillier than an algo-update at Christmas time. Being Canadian (and thus having an understanding of such things at birth), I’ve been asked to provide color commentary for WebmasterRadio.FM.
Figuring that much of the WebmasterRadio.FM audience and most of Metamend’s readers have little interest in curling, I want to use the opportunity to ask smart questions to some of the smartest people in search, the ones who actually run the engines.
Starting today, I am compiling a list of questions from the community. If you have anything you want asked, (expect full credit on the air), please let me know in the comments section here.
Have a question and need quick answers? 
I would be interested to know if the Live Search team has any firm stats supporting the continued use of the Live anti-cloaking bot.
It is notorious for skewing search referral data, and doesn’t appear to be having any noticeable effect on the quality of Live search results, so I’m assuming there is some metric that the Live Search team is using to justify the continued use of the bot.
On a related note, it would be fairly easy to detect the anti-cloaking bot based on the highly generic single-phrase search terms that the bot uses to impersonate a normal searcher. Are there ancillary methods to the anti-cloaking bot being used to identify sites that are using cloaking methods?
Comment by Colin Cochrane — Tuesday, April 15, 2008 @ 12:49 pm
Would it be possible to add “Cloaking” under the “Content Analysis” section in google webmaster tools. When cloaking is discovered by google it would make more sense to warn webmasters of this issue so that they may fix it instead of removing their site from the index. A lot of webmasters are not even aware there is a cloaking issue and do not intend on doing anything malicious. Perhaps google could post a time limit for removal.
Side note: Cloaking would only show up under content analysis when it is detected.
Comment by Kevin Osborne — Tuesday, April 15, 2008 @ 4:04 pm