A very random question

[romeoandjulietlovies06]

I have always wondered since i joined this community what the google spider and Yahoo! slurp sider was. When you click on the Whose's online button I always see the different members of this community that are online, guests and then the "spider" people. Why are they called this and what is it?

Thanks for listening to me babble :D lol

[chromasnake]

LOL--the "spiders" are automatic "bots" (like virtual robots) that crawl around the Internet, seeking new life and new civilization, boldly going where...oh, sorry, wrong topic. Seeking to assimilate you and everything in their path...no, wait...

Okay, the slurp bots and spiders are automated indexing...processes...that try to index text and such for search engines. They can become quite annoying and eat up huge amounts of bandwidth (this means they can bog down the site and make it run slow sometimes).

They have become so annoying to some sites that webmasters put a special "No Robots" message in each folder we don't want the bots/spiders indexing. On sites like this, where a Google or Yahoo search might bring someone to the board who has lots of questions to which they need answers, the bots and spiders are helpful creatures. For example, if you type, "My lovebird is picking feathers, help!" into Google's search bar, you will be returned over 3,000 results, a lot of them from message boards like this one--all gathered by those little search engine spiders crawling around gathering information from various sites.

But there are far too many of them running loose these days, I think they are replicating!

Hope that helps a little!

terry

Edited to add: The "Inktomi" spider has amused me the most, the name that is. "Inktomi" is a spider spirit in Native American folklore, a troublemaker like Coyote. So every time I see Inktomi I think of Inktomi and Coyote and all their troublemaking tales!

[romeoandjulietlovies06]

Thanks a bunch Terry!!!!