Some outfits don't just do fake searches but also fake downloads. E.g. visit https://bintray.com/groovy/maven/groovy/view/statistics#stat... then click on date range "1 year" and wonder why the daily download numbers suddenly multiplied by 10 in late May. You'll have trouble believing the 2.5 million download number for Groovy from Bintray, and wonder how long they've been running the same ploy with Maven.
Late May is the beginning of intern/coop season and Groovy and Maven are popular technologies used by software engineering interns.
Could explain some of the spike.
Very interesting. I assume that he is doing that in order to collect up-to-date search result data. Or is he actually attempting to manipulate search results (or AdWords ratings) in some way?
It's to manipulate the 'auto-complete' feature.
Bingo. That, and clicking on results that are further down actually does help propel them higher.
...and is likely pinging his 5000 or 500,000 fake social networking profiles every second.