Google crawl creating strange characters

[corbyboy]

I have a search cloud feature on a script I am working on. It logs the terms people are searching for and displays them as a list. You can click on the search terms to go to the results for that particular search.

Clicking the text logs it as a new search and adds it to the cloud. Google has been either following the links or running its own searches. Either way, it is registering strange terms such as this:

bÃfÆ'Ã,¯Ãfâ?sÃ,¿Ãfâ

Does anybody have any idea why the searches are being logged liked this? Can this be some sort of encoding issue?

[r937]

Can this be some sort of encoding issue?

yes

[corbyboy]

But if Google is creating the new records by following a pre-existing link, how come the encoding gets scrambled?

[crmalibu]

The website which gave the links to google might have not encoded properly. Or, maybe your application is the fault.

[corbyboy]

The website which gave the links to google might have not encoded properly. Or, maybe your application is the fault.

This is what I was thinking, but what exactly could I be doing to cause this? The URL already contains the search terms, so how can Google crawling the link change these terms?