I’ve noticed that Live Search has been spiking in my statistics lately. But it’s been very weird searches that caused the hits. They always come in the form of “http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=” with some very random word at the end. I’ve repeated the search manually and it was pretty obvious this was the work of a “bot”. I did some research and found lots of web pro’s complaining about this “spam” as they referred to it. It definitely was the work of a “bot”.
I just realised why Microsoft are doing it. If I use Live Search, it does some predictive text prompting. So does Google. This is done using words I’ve not searched for before. I’ve only noticed it in the last few days. Maybe it’s been around for a while.