Since there have been webpages on the internet, scrapers have been out there scraping content off those sites for one reason or another. Well, even Microsoft’s Bing Chat has to deal with scrapers and yes, those scrapers can even cause sites hosted by Microsoft to slow down.

Mikhail Parakhin, the CEO of Bing at Microsoft, said on Twitter that Bing Chat had a “scrapping attack” on the search results pages and it resulted in Microsoft having to shut down answers in the search results during the attack. Shutting those answers down for a bit led to a “lot of extra capacity” for the servers and thus you may have seen a faster response rate from Bing Chat during that time.

Bing is also “running speed optimization experiments on Creative” mode, which may make it faster as well.

Mikhail Parakhin wrote, “Argh… Don’t ask. Well, since you did: we had a scraping attack on SERP, had to shut down SERP answers for a while, because of that there was A LOT of extra capacity. Separately, we are also running speed optimization experiments on Creative.”

Here are those tweets in context:

Argh… Don’t ask. Well, since you did: we had a scraping attack on SERP, had to shut down SERP answers for a while, because of that there was A LOT of extra capacity. Separately, we are also running speed optimization experiments on Creative.

— Mikhail Parakhin (@MParakhin) March 30, 2023

I hate when scrapers negatively impact the performance of websites and online services. It just makes me sad but it is also the cost of running a website and has been for the past 20+ years.

And yes, scraping search engines and even third-party websites are generally against those site’s terms of service – not that scrapers listen to terms of service.

Forum discussion at Twitter.