Saturday 3 April 2010

Google' Wireless Transcoder

I was looking at recent hits on ExtremeTracking and realised the big "G" was not a visit by Google Bot but a visit using Google' Wireless Transcoder. Not knowing what Google Wireless Transcoder was I looked it up, and found out that it is a way of rendering of websites to obtain the essential information, making them suited for display on a PDA.

Although I do not have a PDA I decided to have a play with Google' Wireless Transcoder, its URL is here. Steves Stats is a site I obviously tried:





Much simplified, but all the information is available.

From the above visit, how did the verious counters register Google Wireless Transcoder:

1. No Icon. Hence, nothing registered:

ShinyStats
BraveNet
BelStats
SiteMeter
24Log

2. Icon, but nothing registered:

Motigo

3. Browser identified as Safari:

GoSats (Safari 52513)
GetClicky (Safari 3.1)

4. Visit registered as Google Bot:

OneStat

5. Correctly identified as Google Wireless Transcoder:

StatCounter
W3
ExtremeTracking

From the user agent it becomes apparent why it is mistaken for Safari:

Mozilla/5.0_(en-us)_AppleWebKit/525.13_(KHTML,_like_Gecko;_Google_Wireless_Transcoder)_Version/3.1_Safari/525.13