Googlebot is the search bot software used by Google, which collects documents from the web to build a searchable index for the Google search engine.

If a webmaster wishes to restrict the information on their site available to a Googlebot, or another well-behaved spider, they can do so with the appropriate directives in a robots.txt file,^[1] or by adding the meta tag <meta name="Googlebot" content="nofollow" /> to the web page.^[1] Googlebot requests to Web servers are identifiable by a user-agent string containing "Googlebot" and a host address containing "googlebot.com".^[2]

Currently, Googlebot follows HREF links and SRC links^[1]. There is increasing evidence Googlebot can execute javascript and parse content generated by Ajax calls as well^[3]. Googlebot 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 other known pages on the web in order to be crawled and indexed or manually submitted by the webmaster.

A problem which webmasters have often noted with the Googlebot is that it takes up an enormous amount of bandwidth.^{[citation needed]} This can cause websites to exceed their bandwidth limit and be taken down temporarily. This is especially troublesome for mirror sites which host many gigabytes of data. Google provides "Webmaster Tools" that allow website owners to throttle the crawl rate.^[4]

References[link]

External links[link]

• Google's official Googlebot FAQ

This article may contain original research. Please improve it by verifying the claims made and adding references. Statements consisting only of original research may be removed. More details may be available on the talk page. (September 2011)

Matt Cutts works for the Search Quality team in Google, specializing in search engine optimization issues.^[1]

Career[link]

Cutts started his career in search when working on his Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. According to quotation in a personal interview with an operator of another website, Matt got his Bachelor's degree at the University of Kentucky and Master's degree from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. In the interview he was quoted his field of study was computer graphics and movement tracking, then moved into the field of information retrieval, and search engines^[2] after taking two required outside classes from the university's Information and Library Science department.^[2]

Before working at the Search Quality group at Google, Cutts worked at the ads engineering group and SafeSearch, Google's family filter.^{[citation needed]} There he earned the nickname "porn cookie guy" by giving his wife's homemade cookies to any Googler who provided an example of unwanted pornography in the search results.^[3]

Cutts is one of the co-inventors listed upon a Google patent related to search engines and web spam,^[4] which was the first to publicly propose using historical data to identify link spam.^{[citation needed]}

In November 2010, Cutts started a contest challenging developers to make Microsoft Kinect more compatible with the Linux operating system. At the time, Microsoft had stated that the use of Kinect with devices other than the Xbox 360 was not supported by them.^[5]

Cutts has given advice and made statements on help related to the use of the Google search engine and related issues. ^[6]

In January 2012, on the news that Google had violated its quality guidelines, Cutts defended the downgrading of Chrome homepage results noting that it was not given special dispensation. ^[7]

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• David A. Vise and Mark Malseed (2005-11-15). The Google Story. Delacorte Press. ISBN 0-553-80457-X. 

External links[link]

• Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO – his personal blog
• Matt Cutts on Twitter
• Matt Cutts at TED Conferences
• 2009 BusinessWeek profile
• Philipp Lenssen (2005). "Matt Cutts, Google's Gadgets Guy". blog.outer-court.com, Personal Blog. http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2005-11-17-n52.html. Retrieved December 15, 2006.