Code: Select all
66.249.72.115 - - [20/Dec/2011:00:17:02 +0100] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 404 505 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
66.249.72.115 - - [20/Dec/2011:00:17:02 +0100] "GET /$%5Cgl HTTP/1.1" 200 421 "-" "Googlebot-Image/1.0"
66.249.72.115 - - [20/Dec/2011:00:18:18 +0100] "GET /$%5Capprox HTTP/1.1" 200 428 "-" "Googlebot-Image/1.0"
66.249.72.115 - - [20/Dec/2011:00:20:26 +0100] "GET /$%5CZ%20%5Cto%20%5CZ HTTP/1.1" 200 595 "-" "Googlebot-Image/1.0"
66.249.72.115 - - [20/Dec/2011:00:22:37 +0100] "GET /$%5Cgl%20x%20y%20.%20E HTTP/1.1" 200 640 "-" "Googlebot-Image/1.0"
66.249.72.115 - - [20/Dec/2011:00:24:49 +0100] "GET /$%5Cgl%20x%20.%20(%5Cgl%20y%20.%20E) HTTP/1.1" 200 801 "-" "Googlebot-Image/1.0"
this renders, for instance
\Z \to \Z =

or
\gl x . (\gl y . E) =
)
. Nothing exceptional in itself... perhaps googlebot knows how to interact with a mathTeX service, why not... even though the syntax of mine is non-standard (no "mathtex.cgi" in the url). And this is a standard automated test...
Except... neither \Z nor \gl are valid in LaTeX; those come straight out of my own sk2 macro package. And those are not random strings that "coincidentally" hit some of my commands, those are perfectly formed expressions with meaning.
So, either Googlebot has finally become sentient and the singularity is upon us, or there are pesky humans masquerading as bots.
Note that it's not just the user agent string that identifies this as Googlebot: so does the IP:
IP address: 66.249.72.115
Host name: crawl-66-249-72-115.googlebot.com
66.249.72.115 is from United States(US) in region North America
edit: Even worse, that IP never read this post; or
anything on this forum for that matter so the guy would have needed to do so from another IP. And
nobody so much as looked at the version of sk2 posted on tex.vhugot.com/info.
I really should stop reading the server logs, there are things that simply make no sense at all.
EDIT: mystery solved: the formulae came from this thread:
viewtopic.php?f=19&t=843 . The damn bot should have included the referrer...