Surprised? I was too, when I came across this long article explaining such a possibility. “What if Chrome was in fact a repackaging of their search crawler; affectionately known as GoogleBot, for the consumer environment?” author asks.

In simple words, this is what the blog post trying to establish. There are so many “signals” Google uses in ranking a web page. Recent changes in Google’s ranking methods suggest that they have started looking at more than text of the page. The bot looks at how users see the page. For that, the bot needs to be able to render the page (almost) similar to how a browser does, including the CSS and Javascripts.

For that, the bot needs to act similar to a browser. Google had to build a faster and better browser for their core business, to index the web and Chrome was a expected/unexpected by product of this.

The article here has a detailed and more technical explanation of this. Take a look and let me know what you think!