Google Now Fills Out Forms & Crawls Results

http://searchengineland.com/080411-140000.php

by raghus • 18 years ago

34 18 18 years ago

rms2• 18 years ago

Wow, this is kind of a big deal. Crawling the deep web seemed like the one real feature Google's vaporware competitors could tout.

slapshot• 18 years ago

The deep web isn't limited to GET requests and forms that don't require passwords.

rms2• 18 years ago

Yes, but this is a start... give it a couple years.

And this is still more than the vaporware competitors that are still vaporware.

michaelneale2• 18 years ago

So its ok for them to do this? but if you do the same against google (scraping results) - presumably Bad Things happen?

cstejerean• 18 years ago

Is their search url listed in their robots.txt?

thorax• 18 years ago

Seems strange that you wouldn't have just looked when asking that question (less characters to type at least). Lots of things disallowed.

http://google.com/robots.txt

flyhighplato• 18 years ago

What an interesting problem... so, if you were to build a searchbot, what would it type into those form fields it found?

It has to be very difficult, especially since you can't do too many submits. Could you somehow infer what to put in there based on searches in your own database already?

ambition• 18 years ago

I noticed this happening in my blog's logs months ago, for my blog's search form. I thought it was fascinating. The keywords it chose to search were generally meaningful words that occurred frequently on the site. I'm not sure if they were correlated with the Google search terms that hit my blog.

The corresponding SEO tip is to make sure that your site's search feature works, delivers good results for the keywords and delivers the results to which you want Google to pay attention.

raghus• 18 years ago

Here's Matt Cutts explaining it a little more: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/solved-another-common-site-rev...

Youhavetobelogg• 18 years ago

text Google Now Fills Out 1 minute ago link

dzorz• 18 years ago

What happens when google starts editing wiki pages and filing new bug reports/tickets?

tocomment• 18 years ago

It only submits GET forms, you shouldn't use those for those things.

davidw• 18 years ago

I was sort of hoping they had a valid credit card number:-)

danteembermage• 18 years ago

scaling Ron Paul Graham

phaedrus• 18 years ago

I propose a new sport - Google Crawler hunting. Kind of like Snipe hunting, only you lay traps. Object is to see how long you can keep the Google bot there by generating new pages programmatically, and how many unique things you can get the bot to do.

Google Now Fills Out Forms & Crawls Results

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