Comment by marginalia_nu

Best guess is it's some attempt at blackhat SEO, to manipulate the query logs and typeahead suggestions (I don't have query logs but whatever, maybe they think I secretly forward queries to Google or something).

But really, fuck if I know. I've received no communication so I can only guess as what they're trying to do. I have a free public API they're more than welcome to use if they want to like actually use the search engine, but they still try to go through a botnet through the public web endpoint.

I've talked to a bunch of people operating other search engines and all of them are subject to this type of 24/7 DDOS. It's been going for nearly two years now.