While monitoring the logs, I’ve encountered an interesting URL being examined by Googlebot. It’s a type of pattern I’ve been seeing for last several months and decided to make a comment about it today. There’s a very little doubt that Googlebot is partially driven by machine learning algorithm, and for some reason it’s querying a date of May 14, 2143 on this instance. It’s targetting a Read the Bible in a Year service area I’ve created for my church few years ago at https://kumcabq.org/dailyreading. Apparently, Googlebot has figured out that it could traverse through time and started to query what seems to be arbitrary dates. Here are some dates it has queried in the wee hours of August 12, 2019, in the descending order of query times:
2033-12-07 2025-03-07 2069-05-11 2026-09-01 1865-10-15 2148-06-21 2026-08-31 1865-10-14 2034-10-05 2148-06-22 1865-10-13 2148-06-23 2034-10-06 2026-08-30 2014-12-04 1865-10-12 2132-12-11 2125-12-22
Okay, on the second look, it is actually traversing through one day at a time for years 1865, 2132, 2125, 2026, 2034, 2069, 2025, 2033, and so on. The log has many more dates. It almost looks like an artificial intelligence trying to figure out what correlation, if any, is there between the date and the Bible passages presented on the page. This seems to have gone on for a while. This is just taking up unnecessary bandwidth… not sure what to do — slap the Googlebot’s hand when it gets to this page again, or maybe take the page down?