9 September, 2008

The penny drops

The blog's activity log has been recording something slightly odd for a few days: since 07:23 on Saturday, Movable Type's internal search has been receiving a large number of enquiries for individual search terms, all from exactly the same IP address, which I've identified as the Googlebot.

I was a little concerned at first: was this a new spidering technique to reach deeper into my archives (a good thing) or an investigation of a (spurious!) complaint, preparatory to a blacklisting (a bad thing)? However, I've realised what it is: Chrome. A feature of Google's new browser is an ability to capture individual sites' search boxes, so a user can now directly search the Ministry from his/her browser's address bar.

I have no particular opinion on that, but I'm glad to have worked out what may be happening.