Those random ass SE keyphrases
 

for example...

is a term you'd get a hit for. no keywords but that phrase does appear in the site.

my educated guess is that this is a test for dupe content. but if so, is it from the G bot or their human team?

SEO guys looking for dup content, sites to scrape or whatever.

You can determine what it was human or bot from where the search was made. What's the location?

which site in question?

doubt that as this site was still in the sandbox at the time.....?

unfortunately only running awstats for now (long story) so not sure i can pull that info

not telling :winkwink: that keyphrase is also made up, but similar to what i've experienced

Google likes what it hasn't seen before.
So a sentence or even string of a few words, in which you are the only person to have a website containing gets you all subsequent searches, regardless of page rank. It's why you see what you see. Makes you effectively the only show in town.

stats show what the user searched for to get to your site by using the referrer string. googlebot does not send a referrer string.

Most automated scripts will not send a custom referrer string either so it would not show up in your stats

Humans search for some dumb things. How many people type "cnn.com" or similar on Google.

Googlebot will normally be easily identifiable, but I'd be very surprised if Google didn't also do some cross checking with headers that look exactly like a popular browser.

hmmm yeah....

i just went through that infamous PDF again and saw where they actually tell people how to search for dupes