[DanBC]

> but then a colleague mentioned that this would become a way to get free computation from Google

I'm a bit confused. What computation does the GoogleBot cause to be performed that benefits the Google service user? (Not Googlebot related stuff like indexing).

EDIT: Thanks kyrra!

[kyrra]

Have a bunch of pages with no real content (but have millions of pages). Everytime someone tries to load a page, do some intensive task (ex: mining bitcoins). If you just make it appealing to GoogleBot and no one else, you get free computational resources.

[fragmede]

Sorry, I still don't get it.

How does not charging for outgoing network traffic make computation free? You'd still be paying for everything else, eg the instances themselves, datastore storage, read/write datastore calls, using the logs API, which means mining bitcoins wouldn't be free.

[brianpgordon]

OP's concern isn't with network traffic, it's with GAE compute time. Googlebot keeps causing instances to run.

If requests initiated by Googlebot were free to run, you could make a giant website full of garbage and use each free request to spend 50ms mining bitcoin.

[belorn]

If the mining are done at Google Cloud Storage, initiated by a google search bot, can't Google then identify and handle such abuse? I assume Google already scans for multiple types of abuse, such as sites that spread malware.

[nemothekid]

Google shouldn't really have to do this. Replace GoogleBot with BingBot or GCE with AWS and you still have the same problem. A website operator should be working to make sure search crawlers don't consume too many resources given that the bots follow rules.

Otherwise you'd have a team at every cloud provider trying to figure out how to manage bots.

[skj]

Now you're suggesting that Google basically devotes a team to detecting "crawler-free-quota abuse", when the real solution needs to handles crawlers from many different sources that aren't all Google.

[xigency]

Is that really how it works?