Yes, you're quite right Raf. This is not a free site and the Google ads do help offset the costs involved in keeping these sites running. It's not that bad at all though in that the Google ads are contextual ads.....meaning that they at least have something to do with what we are talking about on a particular thread. In fact, there are sometimes some pretty neat ads showing up on there. sometimes.
WalleyeJigger, that is most likely a Google bot.....called 'spider' or 'crawler'. The newest version of this bot is actually quite sophisticated. Look it up on a search engine to find out what they do.