Google unveils two new web trackers

Google revealed details of two new crawlers that are optimized to scrape image and video content for “research and development” purposes. Although the documentation doesn’t say it explicitly, it is assumed that there is no ranking impact if publishers decide to block new trackers.

It should be noted that the data collected by these trackers is not explicitly for AI training data, which is what the Google-Extended tracker is for.

Google Other trackers

The two new trackers are versions of Google’s GoogleOther tracker that launched in April 2023. The original GoogleOther tracker was also designated for use by Google product teams for research and development in which describes as spot tracking, the description of which gives clues. about what the new GoogleOther variants will be used for.

The purpose of the original GoogleOther tracker is officially described as:

“GoogleOther is the generic crawler that can be used by various product teams to get publicly accessible content from sites. For example, it can be used for spot crawls for internal research and development.”

Two variants of Google Other

There are two new GoogleOther trackers:

GoogleOther-Image GoogleOther-Video

The new variants are for tracking binary data, which is non-text data. HTML data is generally known as text files, ASCII files, or Unicode files. If it can be viewed in a text file, it is a text/ASCII/Unicode file. Binary files are files that cannot be opened in a text display application, files such as images, audio, and video.

The new GoogleOther variants are for image and video content. Google lists user-agent tokens for both new crawlers that can be used in a robots.txt file to block the new crawlers.

1. GoogleOther-Image

User Agent Tokens:

GoogleOther-Image GoogleOther

Full user-agent string:

GoogleOther-Image/1.0

2. GoogleOther-Video

User Agent Tokens:

GoogleOther-Video GoogleOther

Full user-agent string:

GoogleOther-Video/1.0

Newly updated GoogleOther user agent strings

Google has also updated the GoogleOther user agent strings for the regular GoogleOther crawler. For blocking purposes, you can continue to use the same user agent token as before (GoogleOther). The new user agent strings are just the data sent to the servers to identify the full description of the trackers, in particular the technology used. In this case, the technology used is Chrome, with the model number updated periodically to reflect which version is being used (WXYZ is a placeholder for the Chrome version number in the example below).

The full list of GoogleOther user agent strings:

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/WXYZ Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; GoogleOther) Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (like Gecko; KHTML, com Gecko; compatible; GoogleOther) Chrome/WXYZ Safari/537.36

Google Another family of bots

These new bots may appear in your server logs from time to time and this information will help you identify them as genuine Google crawlers and help publishers who choose to leave their images and videos for research and development purposes .