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Google Plus bot name change to better reflect use cases #515

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mckinney99 opened this issue Mar 8, 2021 · 0 comments
Open

Google Plus bot name change to better reflect use cases #515

mckinney99 opened this issue Mar 8, 2021 · 0 comments

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@mckinney99
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mckinney99 commented Mar 8, 2021

Description

Google Plus has a bot with the user agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/56.0.2924.87 Safari/537.36 Google (+https://developers.google.com/+/web/snippet/)

This is a general snippet fetcher that Google has used to display previews of links once they are pasted into Google Plus, however, this is also being used for the same purpose within Android SMS text messages. One could argue the majority of use-cases where this user agent is being used is from the Android SMS snippet previews, as Google has deprecated Google Plus for most of its users.

Sources:

https://developers.whatismybrowser.com/useragents/parse/29525222google-snippet-fetcher

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/62891722/https-developers-google-com-web-snippet-is-this-a-crawler-bot

I would recommend changing this name to be something more generic, as to not confuse users who might think this is only being used for links within Google Plus. Perhaps the name could be "GoogleBot" or even "Android SMS".

How to reproduce

Using the browser gem, paste a URL into an Android SMS text message, and collect the user agent. It should read something like:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/56.0.2924.87 Safari/537.36 Google (+https://developers.google.com/+/web/snippet/)

Which matches on the browser gem as the name: Google Plus

What do you expect

I would prefer we change the name to be 'GoogleBot' or 'Android SMS' to better reflect the majority of uses this user agent falls under.

What happened instead

I get the name: Google Plus

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