Ok, so I just saw this fly by on a new site I put up:

219.142.118.48 - - [07/Dec/2005:19:48:45 -0500] “GET / HTTP/1.0″ 200 2154 “-” “searchbot admin@google.com”

Interesting, I have never seen this user agent before. So, I go and check out the IP address at ARIN and it comes back to the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre. Hmmm. So, I punch the IP address in over at APNIC and here is what comes back:

% [whois.apnic.net node-1]
% Whois data copyright terms http://www.apnic.net/db/dbcopyright.html

inetnum: 219.141.128.0 - 219.143.255.255
netname: CHINATELECOM-BJ
country: CN
descr: CHINANET beijing province network
descr: China Telecom
descr: No.31,jingrong street
descr: Beijing 100032
admin-c: CH93-AP
tech-c: HC55-AP
status: ALLOCATED NON-PORTABLE
changed: yuanxx@chinatelecom.com.cn 20050420
mnt-by: MAINT-CHINANET
source: APNIC

person: Chinanet Hostmaster
nic-hdl: CH93-AP
e-mail: anti-spam@ns.chinanet.cn.net
address: No.31 ,jingrong street,beijing
address: 100032
phone: +86-10-58501777
fax-no: +86-10-58501724
country: CN
changed: lqing@chinatelecom.com.cn 20051107
mnt-by: MAINT-CHINANET
source: APNIC

person: Hostmaster of Beijing Telecom corporation CHINA TELECOM
nic-hdl: HC55-AP
e-mail: bjnic@bjtelecom.net
address: Beijing Telecom
address: No. 107 XiDan Beidajie, Xicheng District Beijing
phone: +86-010-58503461
fax-no: +86-010-58503054
country: cn
changed: bjnic@bjtelecom.net 20040115
mnt-by: MAINT-CHINATELECOM-BJ
source: APNIC

Now, unless Google has turned their operations over to some dude at China Telecom, they are playing games over there. I wonder if Google even cares if people in China are parading around the internet pretending to be them. I mean, if you were going to play like Google, wouldn’t you just use GoogleBot as your user agent?