Live Search Team now improving its engine by improving its live search bot from crawling site pages. They are focusing on helping webmasters to do and improve site indexing on Live Search. Live Search as regards to traffic I have on this site yields second to Google.

According to their site blog. Here the improvements they are now implementing

*HTTP Compression: HTTP compression allows faster transmission time by compressing static files and application responses, reducing network load between your servers and our crawler. We support the most common compression methods: gzip and deflate as defined by RFC 2616 (see sections 14.11 and 14.39). Compression is currently supported by all major browsers and search engines. Use this online tool to check your server for HTTP compression support.

The following links provide configuration information for IIS, and Apache.
o Configure Compression in IIS
o Configure Apache using GZIP or using deflate

*Conditional Get: We support conditional get as defined by RFC 2616 (Section 14.25), generally we will not download the page unless it has changed since the last time we crawled it. As per the standard, our crawler will include the “If-Modified-Since” header & time of last download in the GET request and when available, our crawler will include the “If-None-Match” header and the ETag value in the GET request. If the content hasn’t changed the web server will respond with a 304 HTTP response.

To check if your site already supports the “If-Modified-Since” HTTP header, you can use this online tool to check your server for HTTP Conditional Get support. Alternatively, you can check using Fiddler for Internet Explorer, or Live Headers for Firefox. Each of these tools allows you to create a custom GET request and send it to your server. You’ll want to make sure that your request includes the “If-Modified-Since” header like the following simplified sample:

GET /sa/3_12_0_163076/webmaster/webmaster_layout.css HTTP/1.1
Host: webmaster.live.com
If-Modified-Since: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 01:28:49 GMT

You should receive a server response similar to the following simplified sample:

HTTP/1.x 304 Not Modified

Some old days when MSNBot gone like crazy on my sites eating bandwidth. With this improvements we could expect some difference on Live Search indexing and hopefully on ranking.