Google executing javascript?

[Bddmed]

I'm seeing more and more googlebot hits in my JAVA based tracking.

[crawl-66-249-72-175.googlebot.com]

Agent String: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

Although it's commonly believed the bots don't execute JAVASCRIPT, why is it there.

I don't know.

[jimbeetle]

No, the bot isn't executing the js, the script is simply grabbing and logging the referrer information.

[Bddmed]

I use the Javascript tracking, for real time tracking. Googlebot is on my site several times a day fetching a lot of pages. I don't see all of those in my Javascript tracking. What you suggest seems not to be the case.

[Viper64]

Would have to know more about the script in order to answer the question. Usually trackers have a NOSCRIPT part so they can track at least some basics of robots etc. that don't execute javascript.

Given the number of spam pages redirecitng via javascript in their index, I don't think google is executing/reading javascript. Frankly I don't know why given how easy it would be to do in order to catch those cheaters.

[RichTC]

just my experience

Since the roll out of the new google infastructure the bots can read java script.

Ive been involved with to many sites and seen this to many times now and conclude that if is its on your site the bot will read it

Rich

[tedster]

Sure, bots can "read" javascript. It's just text, and they love to look for URLs that they might not find from any other source. But there is a significant difference between reading a script and actually executing that script.

I'm pretty sure all the search engines are experimenting here. They look to find ways they can deal with and learn from the javascript that's out there on sites, but this is necessarily a touchy area. Given the kind of tricks that javascript can play, imagine what kind of security needs to be in place before a search engine would automatically execute unknown scripts on its servers! You really would need a true "sandbox" in place -- in programmer's terminology.