We’ve been getting more and more complaints of how annoying Microsoft’s crawler for search.live.com is. In case you haven’t seen it yourself, what it does is pretend that it’s a person and spams your sites with tons of hits and fake searches. Check out the screenshot below to see the kind of traffic we see in our own stats every single day.
But no more. Anytime we see a referrer from serach.live.com, we check if the IP is in the range of known IP addresses for their crawler, and if so, we just ignore it.
Microsoft ought to be ashamed of themselves for this type of behavior. This has been going on for a long time (just search Google about it) but it seems to have gotten a lot worse recently. I don’t know if they’re trying to falsely inflate their market share when people view their stats or what, but whatever the reason, one thing is certain – I’ll never use search.live.com for anything, ever.
