Can GoogleBot Spider GZipped Contents?

[Captain]

I have no idea what this question means... but one of my clients asked me this >>

Can Googlebot handle gzipped contents (on the fly compressed content a la mod_gzip)?

Does anyone have a clue as to what this is and if GoogleBot can handle this?

[janjaap]

Googlebot does read the pages so no worries about activating gzip, but it reads the uncompressed page.

Mod_gzip will show the uncompressed page whenever the client who is visiting the page does not give a 'Accept-Encoding: gzip' header and Googlebot probably does not do that since I verified in my own logfiles it reads the uncompressed version. (ie. 31057 bytes against 4856 bytes compressed).

on a sidenote: inktomisearch does read the compressed pages (Yahoo Slurp bot)

[Captain]

Thank you for the response janjaap. Very much appreciated.

[ThomasB]

GG often talked about it in the past and said that he can't see a reason not to do it. Now knowing that Y! does it I wonder why G, having tens of thousands of servers, can't do it. Or if there's a reason against it.

[Krapulator]

I look forward to the day when Googlebot saves us a bit of bandwidth by requesting the Gzipped version of our pages.

[Brett_Tabke]

Daniel Dulitz says that day is very soon.