Scoop! Is this a sighting of the Google browser?
By Nick Aster - April 20, 2005
Speculation has swirled for months that Google was working on a browser. The company has hired browser engineers from Microsoft and Firefox. The BBC reported last year that the search giant owns the domain name gbrowser.com. None of that ultimately proves anything, though.
Checking out SiliconValleyWatcher's browser stats this morning, however, I noticed that, oddly, a few visitors are using a browser identified as "Google 0.X".
We know our readers are on the cutting edge, but this is too cool. Drum roll please? Is anyone else seeing this in their logs?
By Nick Aster - April 20, 2005 | Permalink | Comment
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Comments (16)
nothing new here; this is not indicative of a google browser. i forget the reason exactly; maybe it's googlebot crawling
Posted: April 20, 2005 3:17 PM
I hate to ruin your theory, but:
You have Opera 0.x in your logs, and the first public version of Opera was Opera 2.
More likely, I think it's the Google MediaPartners bot visiting when users of the ad-sponsored versions of Opera 7 or 8 visits.
(Your log also exhibits an unnaturaly large amount of Netscape 3 users, a browser that has been "dead "for almost a decade)
Posted: April 20, 2005 4:04 PM
Do you get a lot of referrer spam? Some of their scripts randomize the UA string in nonsensical ways.
Then there are people like me, who jerk people around by changing their UA string with the User Agent Switcher extension for Firefox (the Gbrowser UA you're going to see isn't real).
Posted: April 20, 2005 4:30 PM
In our search engine spider database (ref.
http://searchbotbase.com/, being the world's most comprehensive) we have no current UserAgent entry "Google 0.X".
The "X", in any case, is only a placeholder for an integer.
Possibly, your tool rendering the stats graphics is faulty and truncated the full entry.
This apart, Arve and Phil are 100% on the money: UserAgent can be faked in various ways. To reliably determine whether this is a spider (Google or other) a full log entry
Posted: April 20, 2005 5:18 PM
Apart from all of the above, how about some IP adresses for those stats?
Posted: April 20, 2005 5:45 PM
There are also other Google UA's out there: The WAP proxy, for instance
Posted: April 20, 2005 6:16 PM
Its the Google Media Partners bot.
Posted: April 20, 2005 7:18 PM
Me I have Martians who visit me regularly...
Posted: April 20, 2005 7:24 PM
it's prtty easy to make the (HACK) as a user agent called bla bla, but what i realy think (hopefully) that there's a google browser, as a matter of fact.. there's a google internet suite under heavy development.
u see... google is already heading toward web applications such as gmail, another thing that insures gbrowser is, there's already internet related software right from google.
hireing engineers from mozilla and microsoft actualy has nothing to do with the browser, why can't we say... studying and understanding more from the standards, or u know... what other companies do to their browsers, mainly... when it comes to google, u may expect anything from them.
i also heard about Google OS, i'm not sure about that one but what do u know about google anyway ?
i've got my hands on some screenies for it, but it's still hard to believe, anyway... let's wait!
cheers.
Posted: April 20, 2005 7:34 PM
the 'easiest' way is to find out via tracking the IP#s of those useragents.
If they belong to places in/around google head quarters i'd say this would be a pretty good sighting.
Posted: April 20, 2005 7:47 PM
The HTTP useragent string can be trivially faked. I wouldn't even
speculate on the existence of a Google browser based on such weak
evidence.
Posted: April 21, 2005 8:06 AM
Nice catch. Thanks!
Posted: April 22, 2005 2:51 PM
The Google Browser is, like, REAL, man, and it's like this Ajax application that runs in your browser. But it's like IE6 or Firefox only right now, dudes.
Peace out.
Posted: April 22, 2005 3:34 PM
Why would anyone want to fake it?
Posted: April 25, 2005 2:51 AM
It's more likely that a gbrowser evaluates from Google Desktop than we found life on Mars.
Posted: April 25, 2005 6:10 AM
Gbrowser information can be found at http://www.youngcoders.com/forum52.html. It is real according to the young computer programmers forum; i hear the owner of that site is a BETA tester of it ;)
Posted: May 7, 2005 10:49 AM