The mysterious lingering Googlebot

For some weeks now a majority of the traffic here on the Grouse logged by Statcounter -- one of the two ways I can track visits, the other is the counter native to the blogspot/blogger.com platform -- has come from Googlebots, which are the little automated agents Google uses to keep crawl from link to link and thereby index everything going on on the web.  I'm not talking about yesterday's post, either.  The bots are going back and looking at stuff that's years old.

Which strikes me as odd.  Google has to know the stuff has been there for some time.  After all, blogspot is freaking owned by Google.

So what are the bots doing?  Do they like my writing? Do they find it insightful?  I doubt it.  My guess is that Google is throwing some natural language processing at the blogosphere to try to actually understand bloggers so as to one way or the other market the data.  Build bigger and deeper datasets into which they can delve more deeply to sell more stuff.  That's what it's all about, after all.