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Googlebot is not a fully supported GMail browser

posted under category: Browsers on February 15, 2007 by Nathan

Using the excellent Firefox User Agent Switcher extension by Chris Pedrick (of the Web Developer Toolbar fame), to test my plan to keep search engines from indexing some of my development sites.

I forgotten that I had my http_user_agent still set to Googlebot and logged into GMail to check the lists. To my surprise, I was set directly into the non-ajax mode with a little message about how my browser wasn't compatible.

Does that mean Googlebot can't index AJAX sites properly? I noticed the other day that it can read flash movies (well, flashpaper), but I wonder if it can handle remoting calls.

Nathan is a software developer at The Boeing Company in Charleston, SC. He is essentially a big programming nerd. Really, you could say that makes him a nerd among nerds. Aside from making software for the web, he plays with tech toys and likes to think about programming's big picture while speaking at conferences and generally impressing people with massive nerdiness and straight-faced sarcastic humor. Nathan got his programming start writing batch files in DOS. It should go without saying, but these thought and opinions have nothing to do with Boeing in any way.
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