2009-08-13
Quite recently, I've noticed an oddity when viewing the visitor logs for my webserver. What has been turning up is a bunch of referrers from single word Bing searches. Bing, for those that may not know, is Microsoft's new search engine. Normally, this wouldn't be that odd if the single word was something very unique to my site such as "Jezra","bwwtolily" or "vattery". However, the single word search referrers that I see in my logs are
http://www.bing.com/search?q=projects http://www.bing.com/search?q=metronome http://www.bing.com/search?q=music http://www.bing.com/search?q=overlay http://www.bing.com/search?q=battery http://www.bing.com/search?q=banjo http://www.bing.com/search?q=using

"Using"? My site is one of the top Bing search results for "using", and "battery" and "music"? No, actually my site isn't in the top search results. A quick check of the visitors' IP addresses turns up about five IPs in the 65.55.104.* range, which, upon further research, turns out to be a know IP address of the MSNBOT: Microsoft's website crawler and page indexer.

So why is Microsoft's crawler passing false Bing searches as a referrer? Is Microsoft trying to bolster the market visibility of Bing by simply spamming server logs? Damn spammers. I'm sure there are better ways to increase market share, such as by creating a decent search engine with accurate useful results. I'll believe it when I see it.
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