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Google bots are crawling in a new way
On the hunt for HTML forms…

By Stephen Shankland

Published: Wednesday 16 April 2008

Google's search bots, which scour the web constantly for new pages, have begun a new, more active phase of their indexing jobs.

In a blog post last week, Jayant Madhavan and Alon Halevy of Google's crawling and indexing team said the company has begun an experiment in which its indexing software experimentally enters text in website forms to see what previously undiscovered pages may appear.

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The post said: "In the past few months, we have been exploring some HTML forms to try to discover new web pages and URLs that we otherwise couldn't find and index for users who search on Google. This experiment is part of Google's broader effort to increase its coverage of the web. In fact, HTML forms have long been thought to be the gateway to large volumes of data beyond the normal scope of search engines."

The new Google indexing practice involves only "high quality" websites and doesn't run on sites with 'robots.txt' files or other standard mechanisms of warding off indexing software.

To decide what words to "type" into the forms, the indexing software samples from among words on the web page with the form, Google said.

The technology looks related to a company called Transformic which Google acquired, according to a blog post by Anand Rajaraman, who was involved with the technology earlier in his career, while working for Halevy.