waving android

I am currently a software engineer at Google, where as a member of the Android platform team I build frameworks and user interfaces.

The blog here at is mostly historical; you can find more recent posts on .

GoogleBot sniffing RSS/Atom feeds

April 21st, 2004


Matt Mullenweg (of WordPress
fame) discovered that Google’s been crawling invented RSS feed URLs on
his site for some time now. So, I checked my logs for the last week,
and, sure enough, it’s happening here too:


64.68.84.9 - - [14/Apr/2004:19:19:12 -0700] “GET /index.rdf HTTP/1.0″ 302 228 “-” “Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)”
64.68.85.12 - - [14/Apr/2004:19:53:39 -0700] “GET /index.rdf HTTP/1.0″ 302 228 “-” “Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)”
64.68.84.9 - - [14/Apr/2004:20:12:29 -0700] “GET /index.rdf HTTP/1.0″ 302 228 “-” “Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)”
64.68.84.9 - - [14/Apr/2004:20:28:14 -0700] “GET /index.rdf HTTP/1.0″ 302 228 “-” “Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)”
64.68.85.12 - - [16/Apr/2004:12:27:01 -0700] “GET /index.rdf HTTP/1.0″ 302 228 “-” “Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)”
64.68.84.9 - - [18/Apr/2004:20:36:33 -0700] “GET /dsandler.rss/index.rdf HTTP/1.0″ 404 - “-” “Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)”
64.68.84.9 - - [20/Apr/2004:18:59:49 -0700] “GET /atom.xml HTTP/1.0″ 404 - “-” “Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)”
64.68.84.9 - - [20/Apr/2004:19:23:48 -0700] “GET /index.rdf HTTP/1.0″ 302 228 “-” “Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)”

I actually have a RedirectMatch directive that points /index.rdf over to
the actual dsandler.org RSS feed, so
Google’s been collecting live feed data from me for a while. What are
you Google guys up to?

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