When Google isn't Google

googlebot goes surfing?

[uncle_bob]

Was checking my logs through yesterday, and noticed googlebot downloading lots of pages, which I'm always pleased with, but it was also downloading images, js and stylesheets. Odd I thought.

Checked the source ip and it came from <snip>
Checked the User Agent and it was the same as the real googlebot/2.1

Behaviour looked more like browsing than a spider or robot, so I guess someone is clearly surfing with a fake User-Agent. While this is probably not that uncommon, using googlebot as the UA unfortunately means our log entries for visits from the googlebot may need to be taken with a pinch of salt.

[edited by: Marcia at 4:57 am (utc) on June 14, 2004]