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I keep getting this multiple times in my referrer list, and have been getting this over a period of months, on and off. 

The Referrer From column indicates:
“search.live.com/results.aspx?q=against”. 

The link is to:
http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=against

Can anybody shed any light on this?  I mean aside from the possibility that someone actually repeatedly and over a period of months does several searches using live.com to see if the word “against” appears anywhere on the internet?

Does the word “against” appear on the internet?

But seriously, I wonder if what shows up in your logs is somehow truncated, and the actual search is a phrase that just begins with that one word.

Best I can think of at short notice.

Good theory, unfortunately I tested it by searching using “against anything at all”, visited the link to my site, found it on my EE list of referrers and clicked the link, and it presented the whole search term in the search box.

Well, that is odd.

I’ve found that if I click the link to the referrer URL on those log listings, the page that comes up isn’t the one that would have brought the visitor to my site where the logs say. Something is getting dropped in the process, that much I do know.

But it does sound like you are comparing apples to apples in your case so I don’t know what it could be.

Well thanks for your input.  Guess I’ll have to keep wondering!

What you are seeing there is the result of an extension to MSNBot that is allegedly trying to discover cloaking attempts.

Thanks for the info, silenz. 

I’m not sure I understand even a fraction of what they’re talking about over there at the link you provided, but at least you’ve shown me there’s a reason (somewhere in there!) for this weirdness.

The MSNBot that crawls the web for pages to include into the live.com search index is sometimes followed by another bot that behaves like a real browser, mimicing a real surfer.

According to what is known from Microsoft this is done to see whether the page is serving different content to search engines than it does to surfers (in order to manipulate search engine ranking).

In fact this is slightly stoopid, as the bot is easy to spot. Also the bot doesn’t honor robots.txt in every aspect, does download images, css and executes javascript and for some time even triggered adsense ads, screwing up the stats.

Also since the referrals are fake, it makes it seem like there is search traffic from live.com which in fact is not there. Last year the referrers had random search words, even porn an pharmacy related stuff. Now they try to use keywords that fit to your pages.

All pretty strange and noone seems to really know what’s the sense in that.

In essence: It is referrer spam from Microsoft.

THANKS!  I think I understand now.  Very interesting. 

I appreciate your help.

Ah that explains a lot. Always meant to check that out. Thanks

Also, there is not qualifying the referrer in the EE referrer module. meaning all those fake spam referrers show up too. That’s why you get referrers from places that aren’t linking to you. They’re not real.

You’d be better off disabling that module and getting something that actually tracks real referrers. I think this module was an afterthought. They weren’t trying to get real involved, just a simple referrer script.