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Mobile Googlebot "uses" Nokia 6820

Someone recently commented on a large proportion of their web site visitors coming from Nokia 6820 devices - even more than from Mozilla based browsers!

Taking a quick peek at my own Apache log file, I noticed quite a lot of requests coming from a range of IP addresses - owned by Google - with the UserAgent set to "Nokia6820/2.0 (4.83) Profile/MIDP-1.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.0 (compatible; Googlebot-Mobile/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"

This probably explains these erroneous stats :)

Obviously Google are not really using Nokia 6820s to crawl the web, but they are presumably performing separate crawls with this different user agent to see whether sites return different content if they know the client is using a phone or other small-screened device. It would be interesting to know how many sites do actually return different content for mobile browsers.

28 Apr 2006 - 13:24:12 BST
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