Comment by cypherpunks

The Google Spider grabs pages from other servers. That's a web client. It's a web client that was easy to write when Google was started, but is almost impossible to write today. If search engines hadn't been invented 20 years ago, they'd be impossible to invent today. The only reason they still work is tremendous work on Google's end to have its spider be able to spider complex AJAXy pages, and that content creators engage in SEO and develop to Google.