Who's Online
11 Registered (DaveT, GameOver, harstad, Jackal, 2 invisible), 20 Guests and 17 Spiders online.

I’ve never seen this term used before.


What's a Spider as it relates to here?

Spiders are what search engines use to keep up to date...they're very effective these days and folks like Microsoft Yahoo and Google burn up a lot of computer horsepower using them to scour the tubes.

I've made a post about a topic asking you all a question, then immediately turned to Google to try and find the answer myself and the top result in my search is the post I just posted!

I've normally heard them referred to as "bots" but I'm pretty certain that "spider" in this case is the automated process where search engines like Google systematically go through a site and all its links, like a spider crawling over its web.

It's also why people (and mods) need to be careful about what is posted. A small post, buried deep in a thread, does not mean that it will go unnoticed by search engines.

Edit: Whoops, Hacksaw beat me to it. Dang, couldn't type fast enough!

Thanks for the replies, that’s how I found this site, from a search engine.

As said above, a spider is a search engine examining a site to see what it contains and what search terms would be most appropriate. The term came about as a “spider” “crawls” the “web” (World Wide Web).

If you click on "Who's Online" on the right side of the screen, it will show you what search engine and what it is looking at. They even get into the profiles!

Roger

I haven't clicked on "Who's Online" in ages so being able to see the spiders listed is something new for me. That's kind of creepy to see what posts these different spiders are reading.