No, moderators, I did not click the wrong Forum by mistake. A new one on me:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; DP Student Proxy; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.30; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.648; .NET CLR 3.5.21022; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729)
The "Proxy" piece sent me straight to the nearest search engine, where I emerged none the wiser except for seeing a staggering number of raw logs in SERPs. (Closer investigation shows that they originate with things like academic sites posting samples of what a log looks like. So far, g### isn't wantonly crawling logs. Whew.)
Option B: Let's investigate the IP. Turns out to belong to The Dufferin Peel [DP, get it?] Roman Catholic Separate. Full stop. Detour for further investigation tells me it's not a grammatical wonky, it's a Canadian legalism ;)
Well. In
my day they were content with slapping on a "banned by the Vatican" and that took care of it. Today apparently they're taking no chances.
Chapter Two. Along the way, I learned a little more about how search engines work. My proxy student arrived via a Bing search for a fragment in a non-Roman script, loosely equivalent to searching for "ing" in English. No idea why; if it had worked they would have got thousands of meaningless hits.
Now, I already know that when g### doesn't know the language, and it isn't in Roman script, it will only do whole-word searches. (My test cases involve one language that's highly inflected and also compounding, and another that's both inflected and polysynthetic. Nobody panic: this simply means that an exact-word search is utterly useless for the languages in question :))
I was hoping to find that Bing is more sensible, but it turns out to behave exactly the same way. A search for this fragment will lead only to a few typos; my site showed up because the ending happens to be preceded by an <ins>blahblah</ins><del>blahblah</del>* sequence, "breaking" the word.
* I was quoting a semi-official** document, so it was essential to make typo corrections absolutely unambiguous.
** For Canadians only: If the Hansard is official, then the Blues would have to be called semi-official, right?
