Some time ago, I submitted a few questions to Google’s head of Webspam and spokesperson, Matt Cutts for his regular Q&A videos.
Today Matt has actually answered one of those questions I asked (I wonder if he realises it’s Lancaster in the UK rather than California?).
Interestingly his answer goes some way to supporting the theory that Google’s “crawler” is a stripped down browser (likely based on Chrome) just without the front-end; rather than an actual bot.
Here’s the video, see for yourself.