This allowed changing the
Accept-Encoding header to gzip,deflate, which then makes it better match the Accept-Encoding sent by web browsers. This then allows proxies like Squid to share cache entries between requests from browsers and requests from Googlebot. Here's an interesting thread on the way the Accept-Encoding and Vary headers interplay to ruin things for proxies. (Here's a page I skimmed that goes into a bunch more detail.) You could argue the blame lies with Squid, which apparently(?) treats the Accept-Encoding header value as an opaque string rather than a list of encodings. On the other hand, doing something smarter depends on Squid magically knowing what circumstances caused a server to choose which Accept-Encoding combination.[N.B.: I'm not an expert on any of this stuff, so feel free to correct me. Thankfully, I was also not involved in the implementation details, so I can excuse myself from blame!]
This was all prompted by an observation by one of the wikipedia folks, who emailed me about it. However, I asked him if this Google-side change helped and he never replied. :~(
