This article was emailed to me this morning and it was a very interesting read. It talks about Microsoft using fake search spiders to generate hits on a website analytics referrer log. I would usually stay clear of rumors like this but in this case I have seen a bunch of traffic on one of my other websites from Live Search.

When I go to check the listing the supposed traffic came from I can’t seem to find the domain anywhere. This has been happening about atleast 6 months that I have noticed.  Here is some of the post on encodable.com.

“As this log snippet from VisitorLog shows, I get about 30 separate hits per day from hosts named livebot-65-55-*-*.search.live.com.  The vast majority of them are bots, not real humans, as evidenced by the fact that they have no screen resolution (and therefore no screen), which while not a guarantee of botness, is a pretty strong sign of it, especially when combined with other bot-like characteristics such as having “livebot” in the hostname.

So far this is all OK.  However, the bot’s USER_AGENT string is set to IE7/Win2003, which is bogus [the full string is: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.2; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)].  It’s clearly a bot, and possibly a spider, so it’s not a real IE7 browser; it should identify itself with an accurate user-agent string like a responsible internet citizen.”

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