Blank referrer and UA with <wbr> in query

Is this some buggy software or search engine

[enigma1]

I am getting some requests where the query looks like:

/<wbr>somenamehere<wbr

seems some broken software tool used by bots and translates the spaces in word breaks then emits them in the query and makes requests to servers. Is there a search engine someone knows about it with this problem?

[dstiles]

I found (and trapped) that in html emails several years ago. I assume it's some kind of pseudo-markup code.