I have a burning question that I can only hope someone from Google answers (or someone who has already received a answer to this question directly from Google). What are all of the IP addresses from which Google serves its index? I realize how presumptuous that may sound but there’s no harm in asking right? It seems like a fair question to me considering Webmaster Tools offers the Top search queries feature which lets you filter by Location. If Google added another filter that let me sort by datacenter (at least a range of those that would likely/ possibly show differences in search results during updates/refreshes) I wouldn’t need the list. Again, just a question.
Follow up with replies to the thread at the Google Webmaster Help Group here…
March 12th, 2008 at 12:37 am
A member named abracadabra replied to my question essentially suggesting that there is no such documentation publicly available and linked to a Google Webmaster Central blog post that states the following:
“The common request we hear is to post a list of Googlebot IP addresses in some public place. The problem with that is that if/when the IP ranges of our crawlers change, not everyone will know to check. In fact, the crawl team migrated Googlebot IPs a couple years ago and it was a real hassle alerting webmasters who had hard-coded an IP range.”
Um…what?! Unless they were not referring to webmasters when they said, “not everyone will know to check,” then what I’m hearing is this. The reason Google doesn’t publish a list of Googlebot IP addresses is to save the development time webmasters would have to spend updating the IP range they’ve “hard-coded” (integrated with their code/script/application)? What am I missing? Or was that just double speak? The “IP range” and the list of “Googlebot IP addresses” are not the same in the context Google used in that quote. The question I asked in the group was simple. I want an active list of Google’s IP addresses from which they are serving search results. That may be the “common request” Google has apparently/seemingly misinterpreted.