What does the Googlebot do?

[Batman]

What does it and other bots that appear in the members list do, exactly?

[jali]

I Googled this : 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.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googlebot

[McNutty]

There's an implied question of "why is googlebot listed as a user", which I can only really guess at without digging into phpbb docs and/or code, but I can make an educated guess: it makes sense for a web site to recognize when a search engine spider (that's what they call things like googlebot, which crawls all over the web looking at stuff) is looking at it and serve pages that will give the spider the best info about the site and waste less of the spider's time on dead ends. For example, there's no sense in even having a "login" link on a page that the spider is looking at, since it will follow that link to no useful end. If the software recognizes the bot and treats the requests from that bot as if a user named "GoogleBot" is logged in, then it's easier to tune the pages for the bot e.g. by having an internal-only "board style" for each bot.

Another simple thing I could think of displaying differently for search engine spiders would be the forum displays: you might want to eliminate the "last post" title that shows up, since those are very transient. It's not that useful if someone does a google search for "Digital cable questions" and ends up with a link to the main forum page where that text no longer appears.

ETA: note that these differences have to be somewhat subtle: google tries to detect trickery, such as sites that return a page that says "naked pictures of <insert famous hottie>" when google is looking at it, but returns an ad for SUPER CHEAP ROLEX WATCHES when a regular user looks at it, and if they catch you at it, your index position will suffer.

[CRSP]

Another simple thing I could think of displaying differently for search engine spiders would be the forum displays: you might want to eliminate the "last post" title that shows up, since those are very transient. It's not that useful if someone does a google search for "Digital cable questions" and ends up with a link to the main forum page where that text no longer appears.

We can control what the Googlebot sees, as it's just treated as a regular user, albeit in a different user group to Registered Posters. For instance, Write Here, Write Now is invisible to the bot, and so was Beyond Thunderdome.

[Batman]

But won't the googlebot attract spammers? If they know a bot frequents a site by seeing it in the members list then won't they be more inclined to spam the site so the googlebot sees their advertisements?

[McNutty]

No, the spammers know googlebot frequents a site whether it shows up in the members list or not. You (and the spammers) can count on google regularly crawling pretty much every site. If I set up http://www.mcnuttyfromdomebo.com and leave this post as the sole link to it, and nobody else in the whole world ever links to it, it will still get spidered by google every couple of weeks.

My suspicion is that the reason googlebot shows up here so often is that there are a huge number of pages to index. So googlebot isn't necessarily looking at, say, the forum index or any specific post every day, but it's just about constantly looking at something.