Google has updated its robots file yesterday and we can see a new line :
Disallow: /compressiontest/
There is nothing yet at this URL : http://www.google.com/compressiontest/ Who knows what Google is doing ? |
Something to do with bringing their newly-purchased video encoding standard to YouTube perhaps? |
Nothing that interesting. I've noticed a request to a similar URL when visiting google.com. It's just an almost empty HTML file that tests HTTP compression. |
On February 18th this year, a large number of people were asking why, when they went to the Google search page (at google.com, but also at various country sites including google.com.au and google.co.uk), the browser was asking to download the file "/compressiontest".
They dug into Google's Javascript, and found that Google was downloading the file into an invisible iframe.
The following day, the Google search page was "fixed" and no longer downloaded the file.
Discussions include: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Web+Search/thread?tid=477b1bcb615b7e54&hl=en http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies-archive.cfm/1387163.html
Probably not related (but you never know) is this project: http://code.google.com/p/compressiontest/ |