Over the last few weeks, I have been noticing an inordinate number of visitors who arrived at this blog based on searches from Microsoft's LiveSearch site. Microsoft's computer was telling my server that all of those visitors were looking for the word "portland" or "greatest." Funny thing, though -- when I went over to LiveSearch myself and ran the same queries, my site didn't show up anywhere near the top of the results. Indeed, I didn't expect it to.

Intrigued by this, I decided to Google around and figure out what was going on. If there's one thing that bloggers and other webmasters like to write about on the internet, it's blogging and running websites. Sure enough, I quickly learned that the whole thing is some sort of sinister spam or spam-like program that Microsoft's been carrying on for more than a year now. Trying to get them to stop is futile, of course, and so the only choice a sitemeister has is between letting them do it and banning the Microsoft robots' IP address from accessing the target sites. Blocking those addresses could mean that LiveSearch will stop finding my site and indexing it for its search users.

But you know what? I resent Microsoft wasting my bandwidth with their dark experiments, and I wasn't getting so much legitimate LiveSearch traffic anyway. And so I've blocked the Microsoft IP addresses from reaching this site. It's really sick that I have to do that. Microsoft, everything they say about you is true! Fie on you!