Removing form=QBHP referrers

Upon looking at my search logs yesterday, I noticed a slew of results in my referer log. As in many, many more than I had the last time I looked (which, admittedly, isn't very often).

Instead of my expected Google search results (let me tell you, the most shocking one I had was "how to stretch my asshole", which led the reader to my jerk neighbor post and one unsurprisingly disappointed searcher, I'm sure), I had a slew of referrers from search.live.com.

Uh... okay....

So, I looked at them. There were thousands of these results, all of the form

http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=table&form=QBHP

with the "table" part being random words that no one (did I say "no one"? I meant "NO ONE") would ever use to find my site. LIke "about." Right, when I search for "about" I expect to find my site.

Riiiiiiiight.

So, I added these lines in my .htaccess file:

RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^65\.55\.(109|110|165|232) [OR]
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^131\.107\.0\.9[56]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} FORM=(LVSP|LIVSOP|QBHP)$ [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F]

If the request is coming from the Microsoft servers, and it has the "form=xxxx" in the string query, it's a bogus query, so don't show ANYTHING. If they want to crawl the site, fine, have at it. But don't put in the bogus referer values and clutter up my search log files. Those are interesting!

Take these recent search queries that brought people unwittingly to my site:

People with long torsos (#3 baby!)
dog trash and dry heaves (#5!)
Russian crunches (#4 in Canadian search results! Whoo!)
sit ice bath (#1 in the UK! Gosh, I rule!)

Who knew that I could be so prolific in so many diverse topics?

I KNOW! Me either!

Now that the search.live.com clutter is gone, I can see them, too!