Google bot

[Tig4r]

Can someone tell me how a gooogle bot works: what does it do? Who maintains it ECT

Cheers, Tig4r

[mondine]

Your second question's a bit easier. A 'Google bot' is, of course, maintained by Google.
As every other search engine employs 'bots.

Simply put, "bot" is short for "robot".
They are just automated programs that crawl the web, moving from site to site to site
by way of the links that are provided for them on each page.
That is why it is valuable to have other sites that link to yours (backlinks).
The more ways that the various bots can find you, and the more popular the page
that links to you, the better your chances of showing up in a search result
for whatever it is that your site does.
The idea, in theory, is for these programs to move through the Internet,
navigating by the same links that are avaible for actual humans.

Of course, this is a very simplified version of a fairly complicated process.
In the real world, lazy, greedy people try to abuse the system and fake
having a worthwhile site by creating fake, spammy links, and search engines
develop formulas and algorithms to make sure that weasels are not rewarded.

[wasim_at_drushti]

A Googlebot is a search bot used by Google. It collects documents from the web to build a searchable index for the Google search engine.brbrIf a webmaster wishes to restrict the information on their site available to a Googlebot, or other well-behaved spider, they can do so by with the appropriate directives in a robots.txt file.brbrGooglebot has two versions, deepbot and freshbot. Deepbot, the deep crawler, tries to follow every link on the web and download as many pages as it can to the Google indexers. Currently (March 2006), it completes this process about once a month. Freshbot crawls the web looking for fresh content. It visits websites that change frequently, according to how frequently they change. Ideally, freshbot would visit a daily newspaper's website every day and a weekly ezine would get crawled once every 7 days.brbrGooglebot discovers pages by harvesting all of the links on every page it finds. It then follows these links to other web pages. New web pages must be linked to from another known page on the web in order to be crawled and indexed.brbr

[SWalkers]

The last two posts are great answers about Google bots!!!