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search.live.com single word search referrers

Soapy Co
Minted
Posted on Jul 08, '08 at 12:57 am

I’m currently running Mint on about 5 domains and for the past month I’ve been seeing search referrers from search.live.com with just a single word appearing in my recent lists.

One of the sites brightsale.co.uk seems to suffer particularly from a batch of 3 referrers altogether with the keywords “online”, “estate” and “agent”. The phrase “online estate agent” is one of our most popular search terms on Google.co.uk and we appear high on search.live.com for the same phrase.

Another site slurp.co.uk seems to make no sense at all, we get constant referrers from search.live.com for terms such as “products” which is obviously very general, on this site there doesn’t seem to be any accompanying keywords that would make up one of our popular phrases.

An example of the referrer URL is here: http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=p … &form=QBHP

As you can see the site Slurp.co.uk doesn’t appear anywhere on any of the first few pages.

The google referrers and all others make sense, it is only these s.l.com ones that are causing problems.

Is there any reason why they are splint into individual referrers? Are these spam bots or am I being really stupid and missing something?

I’m very confused.

Shaun Inman
Mint/Pepper Developer
Posted on Jul 08, '08 at 08:24 am

I’m very confused.

As am I. Someone else just emailed me about the same problem. Are you seeing this in the Most Common tab or just the Most Recent tab?

Do you have the Secret Crush Pepper installed? The latest version allows you to see all visit data associated with a search term (click the magnifying glass on the left of the unexplainable search terms).

Is there a trend? Are all of the unexplainable search terms from the same IP (or IP ranges)?

Sam Brown
Third-Party Pepper Developer
Posted on Jul 08, '08 at 10:26 am

I am seeing this in both the Most Common and Most Recent tabs in the Searches pane and obviously the Most Recent tab in the Referrers pane.

Just installed Secret Crush which will hopefully narrow down some of that information for you.

Sam Brown
Third-Party Pepper Developer
Posted on Jul 08, '08 at 10:57 am

Yes, it appears as though the search terms are from the same IP range, with the hostname ‘search.msn.com’.

and

Shaun Inman
Mint/Pepper Developer
Posted on Jul 09, '08 at 02:29 pm

I’d love to know if Soapy Co. finds the same thing.

Soapy Co
Minted
Posted on Jul 10, '08 at 06:29 am

Sorry I didn’t come back sooner!

I seem to get the same thing, it looks like they are all coming from the same IP range…

65.55.109.69 Hostname search.msn.com Browser Internet Explorer 7.0 Platform Windows Location United States Other Visits On Burgundy White Wine < French… Timed Out From a search for white

and

65.55.109.49 Hostname search.msn.com Browser Internet Explorer 7.0 Platform Windows Location United States Other Visits On Burgundy White Wine < French… Timed out From a search for white

And one example from BrightSale.co.uk

Hostname search.msn.com IP Address 65.55.110.143 Browser Internet Explorer 7.0 Platform Windows On Semi-Detached House For Sale |… Timed out From a search for online

nbj
Minted
Posted on Jul 10, '08 at 09:42 am

I’m experiencing the same issues. My secret crushes and nametags are all-of-the-sudden flooded with those IPs.

Is there a way to block that IP range from tracking in Mint?

65.55.109.120
65.55.109.212 
65.55.109.209
65.55.109.162 
65.55.110.88
65.55.110.107
65.55.110.164
65.55.110.41
65.55.109.118
65.55.110.16
65.55.109.106
65.55.109.22
65.55.110.132
65.55.110.21
65.55.110.121 
65.55.109.119
Shaun Inman
Mint/Pepper Developer
Posted on Jul 10, '08 at 09:52 am

Add the offending IP addresses to the advanced IP ignoring list. Just add ?preferences&advanced to your Mint url to see the advanced Preferences for this setting.

Sam Brown
Third-Party Pepper Developer
Posted on Jul 11, '08 at 04:21 am

I see you already have by default 65.55.165.* in the IP Addresses to be ignored, was this to solve MSN Search being a problem previously?

Would adding 65.55.* be too drastic?

Shaun Inman
Mint/Pepper Developer
Posted on Jul 11, '08 at 08:51 am

was this to solve MSN Search being a problem previously

Yes.

Would adding 65.55.* be too drastic?

Probably. I don’t know enough about that IP range to be certain.

Christina Warren
Minted
Posted on Jul 15, '08 at 09:34 am

Thanks for posting this — I’ve been getting these hits too (not that often, but it was becoming a pattern) and I figured it had to be bots because the time spent on the site was non-existent and the terms were so vague.

wierz
Minted
Posted on Sep 20, '08 at 06:58 pm

this seemed to be sorted for a few months, but in the last couple days the 65.55ers have come back with a vengeance. any advice on dealing with them ?

Shaun Inman
Mint/Pepper Developer
Posted on Sep 22, '08 at 08:44 am

It might be time to add 65.55.* to the advanced IP ignoring list.

Narada
Minted
Posted on Jan 01, '09 at 12:17 pm

Hi,

I have been having exactly the same problem for a while now. I’m getting numerous single word searches from search.live.com ending up on Crushes, Referrers and Searches polluting the other more meaningful data. It’s very unsightly and annoying!

In my case such requests are coming from IPs such as 65.55.109.210, 65.55.109.51 and 65.55.109.20. Having finally gotten sick of it I’ve followed the advice given here and added 65.55.109.* to the banned IP addresses box on a new line via ?preferences&advanced. I’ve only just done that though so I’m not sure if that has taken effect and will resolve the problem or not.

Regarding adding 65.55.* to the default mint distribution banned ip address list - just a side comment to say that it may be a little unsafe. Would it be an idea to check on hostname resolution to see if it resolves to search.live.com instead? That would match future ips too.

I have one question however. Is there any way to clean up all the spam data in mint that has originated from this problem? Although I’ve added it to the banned ip list any data accumulated previously still exists.

Happy new year!

Mint rocks!

Many thanks.

Narada
Minted
Posted on Jan 02, '09 at 03:30 pm

My banned ip list has now grown to the following.

  • 65.55.165.*
  • 65.55.109.*
  • 65.55.107.*
  • 65.55.110.*

I think I may have to resort to banning 65.55.* until there’s an alternative.

wendell waldron
Minted
Posted on Jan 04, '09 at 10:52 am

that’s the exact solution i had to use, the ip ranges started becoming to random and i couldn’t keep track of them any other way…

Narada
Minted
Posted on Feb 01, '09 at 07:01 pm

Use:

DELETE FROM mint_visit WHERE referer LIKE 'http://search.live.com/results.aspx%';

to delete old referer spam. Taken from another forum thread but the extra ‘s’ on ‘results’ was needed to make it work in my case.

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