Google's search engine crawler to stop identifying as an iPhone come April

Starting April 18, the smartphone user-agent of Google's search engine crawler — Googlebot — will no longer identify as an iPhone running iOS 8.3, according to the company.

Instead the agent will identify as a Nexus 5X running Android 6.0.1, Google explained in a blog post. Googlebot is the code that analyzes sites on the Web, its data eventually filtering into ranked results seen when a person runs a Google search.

The user-agent is being updated so its renderer can "better understand pages that use newer web technologies," the company explained. "Our renderer evolves over time and the user-agent string indicates that it is becoming more similar to Chrome than Safari."

The change isn't likely to affect most websites or developers, but does appear to reflect trends, and could mean that Google searches will favor newer Web standards.

Although iOS and Safari have a large presence online, the sheer number of Android devices helps give them and Chrome a bigger footprint. Chrome is also multi-platform, though on iOS it's limited to the same rendering engine as Safari.

15 Comments

9secondkox2 2992 comments · 8 Years

About 8 years ago

Just another attempt to use the search engine as a way to leverage away from the competition.

The only real reason for this.

baconstang 1141 comments · 10 Years

I quit using Google a year ago.

sockrolid 2789 comments · 14 Years

Just remember to clear out all the Google cookies and caches from Safari periodically.

Preferences -> Privacy -> Details -> search for "goog" -> delete.
Takes 2 tries. I just deleted 7 Google caches.

Also remember that 97% of Google's revenue comes from ads.
All their other software projects (and self-driving cars) are either freeware used to crush competition or PR stunts.

volcan 1799 comments · 10 Years

AppleInsider said:

...but does appear to reflect trends, and could mean that Google searches will favor newer Web standards.

I know for a fact that newer or older web technologies makes little difference in ranking. I have a really old plain old html webpage that has ranked #1 for the last 16 years for some fairly common search terms of which the page is about. We also have a Mobile version. It is true that Google does give points though, for responsive designs which can flow and reposition the content depending on the device screen size. Other things that improve your ranking are how many other sites link to your page, how long the page has been on the web and how many times it has been clicked in a Google search.

Things that hurt your ranking are bad html that does not validate, use of Flash, malware, known untrustworthy domains, self signed certificates, using keywords that are not on the page, mention of competitor's name in the meta data, etc. Newer web standards can also be misused or generate poorly formatted code just as much as older web standards can. Ranking is all about being a really good page, not so much the technologies used.