Tech question: Can bots interpret HTML entities?

Can they be used to hide stop words from Mediapartners bot?

[fredw]

I read here a long while back that at least one user uses HTML entities (ampersand-pound-asciivalue-semicolon) to spell out words desired to be hidden from bots, to prevent them from being picked up by the Mediapartners bot as targeting stop words.

I'm afraid that G's bots are smart enough to recognize HTML entities and convert them back to clear text. Can anyone verify for sure that this works?

Thanks.

[jurii]

If the googlebot isn't smart enough for that ... well ...

Google can do a lot of things, certainly they can read unicode and other standards.

[eeek]

I read here a long while back that at least one user uses HTML entities (ampersand-pound-asciivalue-semicolon) to spell out words desired to be hidden from bots

It'd be an incredibly stupid bot that didn't understand the encoding. Not that I haven't seen some really stupid bots.