V7n had some decent insights, but what it comes down to is that GoogleBot will not….well, here’s a quote from the Official Google Webmaster blog.
Most people know that Googlebot downloads pages from web servers to crawl the web. Not as many people know that if Googlebot accesses a page and gets a 304 (Not-Modified) response to a If-Modified-Since qualified request, Googlebot doesn’t download the contents of that page. This reduces the bandwidth consumed on your web server.
In short, GoogleBot is trying to save bandwidth — hopefully as it always has been. Vanessa is just being a little more open about it now.

September 6th, 2006 at 5:31 am
Google Bot consumes a fair amount of bandwidth on my site.
You have a very professional look to your blog John, congrats!