Google launches new crawlers for Image and Video data

Google this week announced the launch of two new web crawlers specifically designed for image and video data: GoogleOther-Image and GoogleOther-Video. These crawlers are variants of the existing GoogleOther crawler, which was introduced in April 2023 for general purpose content fetching by Google product teams.

Search engines like Google rely on web crawlers, also known as spiders, to discover and index publicly available web content. These crawlers systematically browse the web, following links between websites and gathering information about web pages.

This information is then used to populate search engine indexes, which are the foundation for search results. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of optimizing website content and structure to improve its visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs).

Purpose of the new GoogleOther crawlers

According to Google's announcement, the primary purpose of the new crawlers is to enhance the process of gathering image and video data for "research and development." The announcement does not explicitly mention using the data for training AI systems, which is the purpose of the separate Google-Extended crawler.

The launch of these new crawlers is unlikely to have a significant direct impact on website SEO or search rankings. Google's documentation emphasizes that these crawlers target publicly available content and that website owners can block them using robots.txt directives, the standard mechanism for controlling how search engine crawlers interact with a website.

The launch of these new crawlers is a small but interesting development in the ongoing process of web crawling and search engine technology. Here are some ongoing trends to consider:

Focus on Diverse Data Formats: Google's investment in crawlers specifically designed for image and video data reflects the growing importance of these content formats in search queries.

Increased Automation and AI: Advancements in artificial intelligence may lead to further automation of web crawling processes in the future.

The launch of GoogleOther-Image and GoogleOther-Video represents a small update to Google's web crawling infrastructure. While the crawlers are unlikely to directly impact website SEO, they highlight Google's focus on efficiently gathering diverse data formats like images and videos for potential research and development applications.