17 Jul
2006
17 Jul
'06
5:07 a.m.
On Wed, Jul 12, 2006 at 06:24:08PM -0400, Jim Popovitch <jimpop@yahoo.com> wrote a message of 32 lines which said:
The strangeness is that some of their crawling is looking for URLs with multiple exclamation points, those URLs never existed. This may be indicative of a character translation on my system or theirs.
From my experience (and I talked with people - or at least intelligent bots - at Gigablast), their HTML parser is seriously broken and it generates non-existing URL quite often. For instance <a href="http://www.example.fr/Cafe%20au%20lait"> will make their crawler ask for "/Cafe".
I reported the problem months ago but I got nothing except standard "Thanks for telling us".