We are using bbclone to generate reports on Swoogle access. Look at today’s top 10 referers as of 3:00pm:
www.legaladvocate.net 246 26.14% www.myjavaserver.com 152 16.15% www.google.com 125 13.28% dannyayers.com 44 4.68% lucky7.to 34 3.61% ebiquity.umbc.edu 25 2.66% www.google.de 18 1.91% planetrdf.com 18 1.91% mail.google.com 18 1.91% groups.google.com 14 1.49%
One and five are clearly spam sites and two is suspicious, too. The first, for example, appears to be about poker, though the site name is legaladvocat. The site’s text is obviously automatically generated nonsense. All of the links point to subpages in the same domain with a similar structure and content. I assume that once the site achineves a high pageRank, it will be repurposed or sold.
So, it seems like nearly 50% of our hits are due to referer log spamming. I’d guess Swoogle was picked by finding its URL on recent posts found on a blog search engine or a ping server.