tedster - 2:14 am on Dec 11, 2012 (gmt 0)

how would individual ranks of pages explain alphabetized carpet-crawing?

LOL - it wouldn't, and those alphabetized crawls have only ever confused me.

Maybe they start out as a prioritized cherry pick list of the URLs they want to crawl for some reason and it gets alphabetized before they hand googlebot marching orders? That's all I could ever come up with, and it's a stone cold guess. The reason that's my guess is that I've never seen an alphabetized crawl that hits EVERY URL that Google has indexed.