Let me guess; you…

• are a Webmaster or Advertiser
• were searching for either search search.dll sofocus bs or search search.dll sofocus pf on Overture
• wondered why there were 297,594 searches for these key phrases or terms; so, you searched (Google, Yahoo, MSN) it and found little competition for the phrase
• still wondering what it was, you found yourself reading this blog

This phrase (search search.dll sofocus bs/pf) is actually so highly popular because of Webmasters’ automated requests that read data from Overture and then send their requests to either Yahoo, AltaVista, AllTheWeb, etc., and scrape the search results from these search engines.

Next, the Webmaster has their server cache these results to their database and then provides these scraped search engine results on their site and displays ads along side them.

How this could have started was probably from a messed-up eBay search — Just a thought:
http://search.stores.ebay.com/search/search.dll?fp=4&sofocus=bs

PS: This is an SEO experiment to see if I can top the search engine results for this spammed (not by me) key phrase. If you like the type of original research this blog does, maybe you should take a minute to subscribe to this site’s feed (xml, rss) or peruse some of the other content available here.