Thanks for your reply, Kieran.
Yes, we already have to disavow domains regularly. This issue is just a couple of weeks old, but there seem to be dozens of new spammy, low-quality links daily.
(Having looked closer, I’m not entirely sure what their plan is. I can’t tell if someone is doing this to actively hurt us, specifically, or if it’s some elaborate black-hat link-building scheme, leveraging search on our site to turn low-quality links into a higher-quality mention?)
If possible, I’d rather just not give them a page with all the content they want, but if you think no-indexing the search results page is the best, reasonably simple way to trip their efforts up, I’ll try that.
Do you know how I might add no-index only in case of “no result”, though? I think I’d prefer that to no-indexing all searches.