this has been reported on numerous forums already, and i'm not certain that someone at MSFT is aware of the issue.
the live.com search engine is NOT passing correct referrers to the web servers reached from live.com search results.
typically the referrers we get are:
http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=photo
when the actual search was: "photo of the golden gate bridge"
(that's an example).
i.e. the query term indicated in the live.com referrer only contains ONE word, not the entire query, and further more, all the other parameters included in the actual referrer page (e.g. page number, language of search etc) are not passed.
for example:
if i reach my website from
the referrer i get is:
this is not good. it is really important for webmasters to get access to the correct referrers, in order to know what search terms bring the traffic.