Does google do additional crawling pretending not to be a bot?

Question

I have a pair of websites, a "personal" and "professional" which I recently put online.

As I'm not generating content, traffic or doing any promoting yet I've got a really good idea of who's visiting (less than 10 hits a day :| )

In reviewing my logs I found a visit to each site from a google IP (74.125.0.0) apparently using chrome on osx.

The two IPs were very close together, but not the same and the requests were 12 minutes apart. Both hits were without a referrer and only viewed the index.

I have added the sites to google webmaster tools, which I assume is the source of this.

Is their bot pretending not to be a bot to see if there's alternate content?

I suppose this could just be a curious employee, but I would have expected less time between visits and the same IP. Any idea what this might have been if not a bot?

I still don't want traffic so I'm posting A/C

Answer 1

A couple of things spring to mind:

1. A Google employee was doing a manual review of your website because they were following up on a flag that the page may be violating Google's terms of service. Although they automate much of their spam control, human review is still very much in use.

2. Someone at Google was just checking out your site. It happens. :)