Forget Web 2.0, the real talk on the Internet right now has to do with Google’s massive datacenter changes, nicknamed by almost everyone as “Big Daddy”. Instead of just a normal pagerank update that everyone can see in their Google Toolbar, Big Daddy is essentially an update of everything Google, according to most industry insiders.
Google is testing a new data center infrastructure, a feat much bigger and comprehensive than an algorithm change. Dubbed “Big Daddy†both in the search marketing blogs and forums and by the friendly folks at Google, this new data center—still in shakedown mode—will reportedly add new ground-level capabilities into the Google search function and drive those powers deep into all the algorithms with which Google searches, studies and indexes the Web.
The more apparant thing that most webmasters will notice as Big Daddy rolls out is Google’s new spider. Looking over your logs in February you might notice this:
Agent:Mozilla/5.0 (compatible;Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
Google’s new bot is based on Mozilla code and so all that work you did on making your site more open standards friendly should pay off, especially if you check your site with Firefox or any other Mozilla based browser.
For a while now webmasters have been noticing the aggressiveness of Google’s new search bot, and in case you decided to discourage Googlebot 2.1, you probably should think about reversing this action quickly. The notion is that Google now uses this new bot first to spider sites. If you send Googlebot 2.1 away, Google will stop sending any other bots to your site period!
All this means that Google is stepping up and upgrading their datacenters to meet the challenges of newer competitors like MSN and Yahoo.