Strange happenings at Microsoft’s Search Engine

Posted by jerry as Uncategorized

So, with all of the looking at logs I’ve been doing lately, I noticed something really unusual.  Visits from hosts in the same range as the normal MSN bot that appears to be downloading whole pages (css, images, etc), which are referred from a search that looks like this:

http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=myself&mrt=en-us&FORM=LIVSOP

 The keywords keep changing, and they are landing at different sites.  My theory is that MSN is going through an validating the search results for different terms, and analyzing the whole page - probably in an attempt to stop spam.  I suspect that it is running through the entire index of terms that are associated with the site and “viewing” each in turn.

I’m seeing this activity for all of the sites I own and manage.

 This appears to have been going on for about a week now.  Hopefully MSN is on to something that will help reduce the amount of spam in their search results.