I think I found the "quality bot"?

IP from Google, claiming to be IE 6.0

[toomer]

Ok, this is kind of interesting. I'd noticed some new reverse DNS entries coming into a few of my sites recently, but they weren't any of the normal Googlebot entries I had previously cataloged. Tonight, I was playing around a bit on AdWords - and decided to try launching a simple 1 keyword campaign for a new site I'd thrown together a couple weeks ago. It's nothing fancy, but AdSense and the Google spiders have had plenty of time to crawl the page over the last two weeks, so they knew what was there - the advertising was targeted very well.

As soon as I activated an AdWords campaign ... this host came through and loaded the landing page (default.asp). I mean, we're talking almost down to the minute. I wasn't timing it exactly ... but 23:34 was right about the time I was launching that new campaign. Could this be the "quality bot", trying to cloak itself as IE? Seems a bit too coincidental to be anything else. Tsk, tsk Google .... not properly identifying yourself in USER-AGENT.

IP: 66.102.6.136
RDNS: mc-out-f136.google.com

ARIN INFO
---------
OrgName: Google Inc.
OrgID: GOGL
Address: 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
City: Mountain View
StateProv: CA
PostalCode: 94043
Country: US
NetRange: 66.102.0.0 - 66.102.15.255

IIS LOG (my IP removed):

2006-07-13 23:34:17 W3SVC691646379 xx.xx.xx.xx GET /Default.asp - 80 - 66.102.6.136 Mozilla/4.0+(compatible;+MSIE+6.0;+Windows+NT+5.1;+SV1) - 200 0 0

There's a few more of these "mc-out-fnnn.google.com" entries that have come through just this week.... will have to look back through my logs for others....

[jmorgan]

Could it be a manual check? Although you would think they'd be encouraged to use FireFox. :)

[IM_Mike]

Yep, that's a bot. That IP comes in every time you place a new ad on google and makes sure that the landing page matches what you typed in among a few other things I'm sure. If it sees a problem I believe it kicks off a notice for a manual review and then you get an email from Goog. I have logs from that IP back into last year.

Whether it is the quality checking bot as well.. not sure.

-Mike

[IM_Mike]

I see a different IP for manual reviews. You see enough of the same IP(s) in your logs you start to investigate...

-Mike

[toomer]

So - likely that all the MFA's have to do is cloak to this address ... and they're going to be just fine?

Great. And here G thought they were all smart and figured out a technical solution to the MFA problem (as reported 3rd hand by datagrrl in one of the other threads). What a bunch of eggheads.

[moralee]

I have this same IP in my stats as a regular visitor. I don't have any ads. Google also shows up with another IP. I don't get it.

[rbacal]

So - likely that all the MFA's have to do is cloak to this address ... and they're going to be just fine?

No. Unlikely. Possible but unlikely to succeed over time. Cloaking would only work if a) you know how QS is constructed, and b) you are willing to alter your sites A LOT to trick it. My guess is the bot collects some information used in QS, but also that a LOT of other variables are included that are not tied to what the bot collects (i.e. other domain related factors, bidding patterns.)

The whole idea of MFA's is to create a lot of sites without content -- low overhead. If you have to, for example, add real original content and features to a page served up only to the bot, you STILL have to add that content.

I'm sure people will try. Some may even succeed temporarily (as with the domain switch cheat).