Googlebot/Test is getting more and more active

Do other experience the same

[ThomasB]

Here are some april stats for a new domain that make me curious what GB/Test is and what he does.

# Hits User Agent
1 6262 Googlebot/2.1 (http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)
2 201 FAST Enterprise Crawler/6 (www.fastsearch.com)
3 195 Googlebot/Test (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)
(numbers adjusted)

I didn't do any further research if he has different behaviour, accepts different things (cookies, gzip, ...) but maybe it's just a test that does not (yet) affect the SERPs.

[jcoronella]

I have for a new domain:

4230 Googlebot/2.1 (http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)
14 Googlebot/Test (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)

This is over the course of Apr. Site started mid march. Funny thing is, Gtest grabbed pages with "test" in the url first - I'm sure purely a coincidence, but notable.

[sandor]

anyone know how this testbot is different from the other bot? i heard it was testing javascript link spidering, but i wonder what else they could be 'testing' ... hmmmm

[idoc]

I have seen it but for me it has been only asking for .pdf files so far.

[ncw164x]

Only asking for html files from my sites

ncw164x

[ThomasB]

just normal websites (no images), but that it makes 3% of GB traffic makes me think.

Anybody doing some logfile analysis to compare GB/2.1 and GB/Test?