MattCutts - 6:02 am on Aug 16, 2008 (gmt 0)

graywolf, whitenight, it's not spin at all. Bots send a lot of traffic to Google, not only for scraping and ranking checking but also to try to find email addresses, guestbooks to spam, and forums to linkbomb. That's not all, either. Anybody remember the Santy worm? Boy, I sure do. It spread to new webservers by searching on Google to find vulnerable webservers. In fact, Niels Provos wrote a whole paper about this stuff. Search for [search worms] to read it.

Does the name Niels Provos sound familiar? It should. :) Do a search on Google for the phrase The reason behind the "We're sorry..." message to find his post which was all about bots, DDoS attacks, search worms, and botnets.

graywolf, just because you don't hear about it doesn't mean that we don't have a team of people working to protect Google against various types of bots. Because we do. :)