Googlebot gets smarter; Smile for the picture.
Enter: Googlebot 2.0
But that was so 2005. 2006 sees the introduction of a newer, smarter and pickier Googlebot. One that cares about CSS and JavaScript, position and layout. Utilizing what shows up in logs as
I suppose the most obvious reason for this is that Mozilla Googlebot is taking snapshots of our websites in order to integrate the ever-so-popular but sometimes irritating thumbnail feature so many smaller search engines have implemented, or they're doing something much more Google; Searching our websites like a human being.
It seems to me that in order to maintain the ability to produce relevant ads to display, Google needs to be able to tell what information is important by finding out where it is, what it is and how it's displayed. The only way to do that is to start looking at our websites and seeing them like we do.
Whatever the reason for this new crawler, It'll be interesting to see what they do with the new information they're collecting. As the web evolves, so must Google.