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Google Calendar Coming Soon?

Posted by samzenpus on from the more-google-for-my-google dept.

mcpastore writes "Blogs have recently been buzzing over the possibility of seeing a Google Calendar popping up soon. Dave bases his prediction on the fact that one of his sites has been getting a tremendous amount of hits from GoogleBot ever since he added the iCal calendar. It makes perfect sense Google would try to go after the calendar market as it is their last big missing piece of the portal puzzle."

3 of 313 comments (clear)

  1. Er, no, not really by Scott+Laird · · Score: 5, Informative

    While Google may or may not be working on a calendar, his "evidence" is lacking. Basically, he's saying that Google is walking his calendar a lot, and using that as evidence that Google is building itself a calendar. There's a much simpler explanation: Google goes nuts when it runs into PHP iCalendar. It sees every link as a new page to look at, and after a few runs by googlebot, it's trying to index the daily calendar page for every day within a decade of today. I've been dealing with this today, adding robots.txt entries to keep it away from PHP iCalendar, because Googlebot is generating thousands of hits per day on my little site.

    So, just because Googlebot and PHP iCalendar don't get along, that doesn't mean that Google is busy building up a monster searchable calendar.

    Having said that, I'd love to see a gmail calendar component that you could access via WebDAV. I don't see how they'd make money on it, though.

  2. Based on a shaky premise by Blowfishie · · Score: 5, Informative
    Calendar web pages are a tricky problem for search engines because they usually have links in them to navigate forward/back a month or to view a particular day in more detail. Navigating in this way can look like a lot of different pages if the parameters are passed in a URL because the pages are dynamically generated ad-infinitum. The poor search engine will recursively rip through each month of the year until some subroutine in the search engine decides that the page has had enough and then it will do it all over again the next time it indexes the site.

    I wrote a PHP calendar page three years ago and it had so many hits from recursive links that I had to put an entry in the 'robots.txt' file to stop it. Looking at my logs, it had scanned every month for about 20 years in the past and 20 years in the future.

  3. Robots.txt and Google by GundyRage · · Score: 5, Informative

    We run a college LUG web site ( here ) and noticed that both Google and MSN had bots that appeared to be "stuck" in the calender (iCal) section of our site. We added entries to our robots.txt to keep them out of there. That cut down on server traffic almost instantly and what appeared to be regular crawling resumed.

    If both Google and MSN did it, it makes me wonder if this guy is a little trigger happy with his predictions. We didn't really even have any content in the calender area so I can't figure out why they would keep crawling all these empty pages.

    Who Knows? - G