jc unknown var cloak.daily-2009-08-25-62-00.vars.referer

[1EightT]

I noticed brief mention of this in another thread. Anyone here have any clue as to the usage of this referrer by google? The term cloak obviously stands out. The ip in question that this referrer came from is: 64.233.172.17

It belongs to Google, but isn't an indexing bot as it doesn't have a reverse dns record.

[1EightT]

At least 15 other user agents for the same bot:

64.233.172.17
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; GoogleToolbar 4.0.629.4924-big; Windows XP 5.1; MSIE 6.0.2900.2180)

64.233.172.17
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; Google Wireless Transcoder;)

64.233.172.17
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)

64.233.172.17
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)

64.233.172.17
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; Media Center PC 4.0)

64.233.172.17
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)

64.233.172.17
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; Google-TR-1)

64.233.172.17
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)

64.233.172.17
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; InfoPath.2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; OfficeLiveConnector.1.3; OfficeLivePatch.0.0),gzip(gfe) (via translate.google.com)

64.233.172.17
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)

64.233.172.17
Mozilla/5.0 (en-us) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko; Google Wireless Transcoder) Version/3.1 Safari/525.13

64.233.172.17
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051111 Firefox/1.5

64.233.172.17
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.7) Gecko/20060909 Firefox/1.5.0.7

64.233.172.17
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.7; Google-TR-1) Gecko/20060909 Firefox/1.5.0.7

64.233.172.17
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686 (x86_64); en-US; rv:1.8.1.20) Gecko/20081217 Firefox/2.0.0.20

[GaryK]

It belongs to Google, but isn't an indexing bot as it doesn't have a reverse dns record.

We've seen many examples here recently of all the major search engines not supplying a Reverse DNS.

In my log files msnbot is easily the worst offender. Googlebot's been doing this a lot too.

[wilderness]

There many old
threads on 64.233.172. [google.com]

Google uses the IP range with a variety of their online tools, as a result you'll see UA's of many flavors.

Denying the IP does not have any adverse effect on the google bot crawls.

[dstiles]

The string includes the date. If it helps, the date it visited one of my server's sites was 1st August with an included date of 28th July. I haven't cross-checked with bot activity on that date.