When it comes to search engines and their bots, I never really expect much from them.  They find links and they go to the page to check it out.  Simple right?  Well, then it was announced roughly a month ago that Google Bot cawls Forms with GET requests.

Sure that sounds cool, but I never thought I'd actually see it in action.  I coded a fantasy trade analyzer that uses GET requests rather than POST.  Today I look and notice there are way more trades evaluated than normal.  I check my logs and low and behold. . who do I see?  Google Bot!

The most fascinating thing about it isn't the fact its crawling the form like they said it would.  I figured it must be putting in nonsense data.  I looked further into it and noticed Google Bot is actually inputting player names to be evaluated! It is smart enugh to realize that it should have at least one player name for "My team" and one player name for "his team".

One thing I should mention is that the headers say "Mediapartners-Google"  rather than "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)".  However, the IP that both headers are coming from is crawl-66-249-67-183.googlebot.com.

Feel free to chime in on this one.