Not counting Googlebot in click counter

[HaLo2FrEeEk]

I have a click counter on some of the links on my frontpage.  What it does is, obviously, counts the number of times a link has been clicked.  It's very simple with no checks in place, meaning anyone could come and click it 100 times, and the count would just go right on up.

 

What I wantto do, though, is exclude Googlebot from the counting process.  I don't care if we get extra clicks from people, but I don't want search bots like googlebot, yahoo bot, etc. to influence the click counter.

 

I know that Googlebot's IP range is 66.249.*.* (I think), but is there a better way?  I mean, what if googlebot changes it's IP range?  Anyone have any tips?

[trq]

You could check the user-agent. eg;

 

if (!preg_match("^Mozilla\/5\.0 \(compatible\; Googlebot", $_SERVER['USER_AGENT']) && !preg_match("^Mozilla\/5\.0 \(compatible\; Yahoo! Slurp", $_SERVER['USER_AGENT'])) {
  // user not a bot.
}