I don’t know why they’re doing this and what do they want. Any ideas? Thanks!
AI-generated summary
Users reported a persistent issue where ‘Trending Search Terms’ lists are flooded with spam, primarily from bots searching for URLs and specific keywords like .cn domains, rendering search analytics useless snakeninny. Early suggestions included blocking specific domains or regex patterns, but codinghorror noted that engineering effort might be disproportionate to the low impact on some sites. Richie highlighted that their logs became almost entirely useless due to bot activity, as blocking words only prevented posting, not searching.
A solution was identified by Falco, who pointed to a hidden site setting, rate_limit_search_anon_global, designed to limit searches from anonymous users. Canapin clarified that this setting expects an integer value representing the number of allowed searches per minute. Richie confirmed that enabling this setting resulted in “zero spam” and restored accurate statistics.
Years later, Richie revisited the thread in 2026, noting the original setting name was missing. Falco confirmed the setting had been renamed to rate_limit_search_anon_global_per_minute. Richie verified that updating this configuration took immediate effect without requiring an application rebuild.
Have you seen this @sam? Odd.
This happens in Google Analytics all the time — the hope is that the searches are published somewhere or an admin visits the link.
I wonder if the same user is spamming these? Could we possibly look for a user who is searching for a url hundreds of times and flag their account?
For a lot of communities it’s uncommon for users to search URLs at all, so it probably doesn’t even need to be hundreds.
It sure is a very frustrating abuse factor, maybe we should auto eliminate spammers from the list, same IP or user, a gazzilion searches
I really would like to see the raw data here
Have not seen this before on our sites
I can send you the raw data for sure; which file is it?
Have been seeing this myself lately – anything I can do to send data along or get it looked at? This thread seems to have died down. Thanks!
Where have you seen it exactly? Can you share a screenshot?
Would a “simple” fix be to just block anonymous users from searching for anything that regexes like a domain?
It looks like you could win by simply banning all searches for .cn domains, somehow, but the actual impact is so low here (and what they are doing is so pointlessly ineffective) it’s hard to justify any engineering effort.
Our site is seeing something similar, but slightly different.
We appear to have some kind of bot performing a daily search on our forum for a few keywords.
Is there a way to block specific search terms?
Or, a way to link a search term to an IP address, then in turn to block that IP?
These, for example, are significantly skewing our search term data analysis:
Capybara is part of discobot. That you see that is a good sign that discobot is working and people are making it through the new user tutorial.
The others I do not recognize.
I am not sure what the issue is honestly with having some random keywords on this list. A bit weird, sure, but you are the only one who sees it.
Maybe some ability to prune this list would be interesting. Eg never show me again how many people searched for capybara on my site. But not a high priority methinks.
Sorry to revive this old topic, I am facing a lot of the same spam.
How would one ban all searches for .cn domains?
I’ve already added a filter to the blocked word list, but searches are still coming through
Not sure what the point of these are, but it’s extremely annoying to see so much spam between search logs 
We’re still getting all manner of useless stuff appearing in our search results.
I’m guessing its a (search) bot of some sorts as it all comes flooding in on one date, then disappears for another month.
I tried adding some keywords to our blocked words list but that doesn’t seem to stop people searching for those keywords, it only stops them posting those words.
I’m sure I’ve asked this before, can we turn off search functionality for users that are not logged in?
Or does anyone have any suggestions on how to resolve or work around this? Our search logs are meaningless when they’re full of bots/junk
There is a hidden site setting named rate_limit_search_anon_global that can be used to limit this.
Thanks @Falco
Is it expecting boolean or an integer value?
Details are in site_settings.yml, it’s expecting an integer value: