SEARCHENGINES
Google Adds New Crawler Named GoogleOther To Help Googlebot

Google has added a new crawler to its list of Google Crawlers and user agents, this one is named GoogleOther. It is described as a “generic crawler that may be used by various product teams for fetching publicly accessible content from sites.”
For example, it may be used for one-off crawls for internal research and development, Google explained. The GoogleOther crawler always obeys robots.txt rules for its user agent token and the global user agent (*), and uses the same IP ranges as Googlebot.
The User agent token is “GoogleOther” and the full user agent string is “GoogleOther.”
Gary Illyes from Google explained on LinkedIn that this new crawler will “replace some of Googlebot’s other jobs like R&D crawls to free up some crawl capacity for Googlebot.”
Gary wrote, “We added a new crawler, GoogleOther to our list of crawlers that ultimately will take some strain off of Googlebot. This is a no-op change for you, but it’s interesting nonetheless I reckon. As we optimize how and what Googlebot crawls, one thing we wanted to ensure is that Googlebot’s crawl jobs are only used internally for building the index that’s used by Search. For this we added a new crawler, GoogleOther, that will replace some of Googlebot’s other jobs like R&D crawls to free up some crawl capacity for Googlebot. The new crawler uses the same infrastructure as Googlebot and so it has the same limitations and features as Googlebot: hostload limitations, robotstxt (though different user agent token), http protocol version, fetch size, you name it. It’s basically Googlebot under a different name.”
There is no comment on if this crawler may or may not be used for Google Bard.
So if you see this new crawler, GoogleOther, this is what it is about.
I think they should have named it “MiniMeGoogleBot.”
Just a clarification from Gary:
> used by Google product teams for internally building the Google index
the other way around: Googlebot is used for index building, GoogleOther for the other tasks historically owned by Googlebot
— Gary 鯨理/경리 Illyes (@methode) April 20, 2023
like, random one-off crawls we used to do for learning something. Wanna learn how many sites *require* an accept language request header? run a crawl job. This used to be with googlebot, now it’s gonna be with GoogleOther.
Please don’t overthink it, it’s really that boring.— Gary 鯨理/경리 Illyes (@methode) April 20, 2023
Forum discussion at LinkedIn.
SEARCHENGINES
Google Hanukkah Decorations Are Live For 2023

Hanukkah (aka Chanukah) starts this coming Thursday night, December 7th. Google has added its Hanukkah decorations to the Google Search results interface to celebrate. Google does this every year and I expect to see the same rollout in the coming weeks for Christmas and Kawanzaa but for now, since Chanukah is in the coming days, we have the Hanukkah decorations live at Google Search.
Here is a screenshot of the Chanukah decorations as they look like on the mobile search results.
You can see it yourself by searching on Google for [chanukah], [hanukkah], but not yet [חֲנוּכָּה] or other spelling variations yet but it should soon. It looks better on mobile than it does on desktop results.
To see the past, the 2023 decorations, 2021 decorations, 2020 Chanukah decorations, 2019 Google holiday decorations, the 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010 and so on.
Happy Chanukah, everyone!
Forum discussion at X.
SEARCHENGINES
Google Pay Accepted Icons In Google Search Results

Google seems to be testing a Google Pay Accepted label or icon in the Google search results. This label has the super G logo followed by the words “Pay accepted” words next to search result snippets that support Google Pay and notate such in their structured data.
This was first spotted by Khushal Bherwani who shared some screenshots of this on X – here is one:
Here are some more screenshots:
Here is test and without test window for same query. pic.twitter.com/n9cYWBOsro
— Khushal Bherwani (@b4k_khushal) October 20, 2023
Brodie Clark also posted some screenshots after on X:
In continuation from the test from October, Google is now testing out a new Google Pay label associated with organic results. Last month, Google was testing Pay Accepted text, with this month changing it to Pay encrypted checkout. More details: https://t.co/MvFNoPmMDR pic.twitter.com/WDVVc4RbTO
— SERPs Up 🌊 (@SERPalerts) November 30, 2023
I tried to replicate this but I came up short.
This is not the first time Google had similar icons like this in its search results.
Forum discussion at X.
SEARCHENGINES
Google Discover Showing Older Content Since Follow Feature Arrived

Typically, Google Discover shows content that is less than a day old, but it can show content that is weeks, months, or even years old. However, typically, Google will show more recent content in the Discover feed. Well, that may have changed with the new Google follow feature.
Glenn Gabe, who is a very active Google Discover user, noticed that since the Follow feature rolled out, he has been seeing content that is weeks and months old way more often than before the follow feature rolled out. Glenn wrote on X that “this could also be playing a role. i.e. Google isn’t providing as much recent content, but instead, focusing on providing targeted content based on the topics you are following.”
It makes sense that if you follow a specific topic and if Google Discover only shows the most authoritative types of content, it might be hard for Google to find new content on that topic. So it does make sense that Google may show older content more often for that specific topic you follow.
Here are screenshots Glenn shared:
Have you noticed this in your Discover feed?
Forum discussion at X.
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