Googleswarmed

Something happened to ongoing today that I haven't seen before. Suddenly, for a few minutes this afternoon, the Google crawlers were all over me, and I'm wondering if this happens often and what it means.

Looking back at five weeks of server logs, I see 561, 863, 525, 856, and 1337 visits from the big Goog. Interesting pattern there, n'est-ce pas?

Anyhow, I was doing something crushingly boring this afternoon, and had a log trace running in one window trying to help me understand another anomaly that's worrying me, and all of a sudden I had 124 visits from Googlebot between 16:36 and 16:42, and more than one per second during the 16:36 minute.

It's an interesting ecosystem out there. I wonder if someone at Google pushed a button, and if so why?