Surprised? I was too, when I came across a long article exploring this possibility: what if Chrome was, in effect, a repackaging of Google’s search crawler — affectionately known as GoogleBot — for the consumer environment?
In simple terms, that’s the theory the article lays out. Google relies on dozens of “signals” to rank a web page, and its ranking methods have increasingly gone beyond just the page’s text. The crawler looks at how users actually see the page, which means it needs to render that page (almost) the way a browser does, CSS, JavaScript, and all.
To do that, the crawler needs to behave like a browser. The theory goes that Google needed a fast, modern browser for its core search business anyway, and Chrome was an expected — or unexpected — byproduct of that effort.
The original article here goes into more technical detail. Take a look and let me know what you think.
Update: Years after this theory first made the rounds, Google confirmed something close to it. In 2019, Google announced that Googlebot had become “evergreen,” meaning it now renders pages using the same underlying engine as the latest stable version of Chrome (Chromium), rather than the outdated Chrome 41 engine it had relied on for years. It’s not quite the same claim as this 2012 post made, but the underlying idea — that Google’s crawler and Google’s browser are built on shared rendering technology — turned out to be right.
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