What is this?

[inactive_jumpenjuhosaphat]

I get a lot of traffic from this search engine, but I have no idea what or who it is.

starware.com/dp/search

I get 20 or so hits from varying subdomains of this site every day, including as.starware, my.starware, and as.weatherstudio

Have any of you ever heard of this engine, and what's the deal?

[temi]

Its a very interesting site, does not say anything about itself, I did a whois on the domain and got the info below, looks like its owned by Miva.



Registrant: Make this info private
Starware
143 Varick Street
New York, NY 10013
US

Domain Name: STARWARE.COM

Administrative Contact , Technical Contact :
Administrator, Domain
dnsdirect@miva.com
143 Varick Street
New York, NY 10013
US
Phone: 212-231-2000

Record expires on 02-Dec-2009
Record created on 01-Dec-1992
Database last updated on 27-Jun-2006

[OldWelshGuy]

It is logspam.

[temi]

Originally Posted by OldWelshGuy

It is logspam.

Can you expand on that please James, what is a logspam? you mean they are not actually sending any traffic to him, just spamming his log files? Why benefit do they get from doing that?

[inactive_jumpenjuhosaphat]

I don't make my logs public though, at least I don't think I do. Perhaps I need more help here than I thought....

[OldWelshGuy]

Logspam is a common form of spamming. Spiders can travers servers, so it is important that you password protect any folders you don't want accessed (you should do this for security anyhow). But a common way we (yes that imight have included me in the bad old days ) would use these tactics when promoting prn & gamling sites.

You spam the crap out of logfiles, and people visit your site to see where the traffic comes from. often times they post links to it on forums etc, and often they will link back as well.

Early black hat stuff

[temi]

Now I know what logspam is, I probably never fall for it because I very seldom check log files on my sites.