Googlebot’s Javascript Interpreter: A Diagnostic

Warning: This is very old. I began writing this several months ago and just never published after some back and forth w/ Matt Cutts. Take with a grain of salt. Over the past two weeks multiple respected bloggers in the search community have commented on the increasing abilities of Googlebot, especially following Google’s announcement that it can now handle some forms of AJAX. I have, admittedly, long believed that we over-estimate what Google and Googlebot are capable of, so I wanted to run a proper experiment to determine the exact capabilities of GoogleBot in reading and interpreting Javascript. The Question How sophisticated is Googlebot’s javascript interpretation and, more specifically, which Javascript functions can Google accurately interpret....