I just joined this forum back on saturday and I was just wondering what spiders on the who's online thing mean? for instance it says 4 spiders online?

spiders crawl along the web and check things out- they are what are used for the search engines

A "spider" is a computer program that automatically collects the content from a web site for a search engine. "Spider" is an old term, the current term is "Bot."

The process of "crawling" a site is to ensure that the most recent content is always available to Google and the other search engines. The more popular the site, the more frequently the bots come to scan the content, so as to ensure the most recent content is always in the search engine's index of web sites.

When it says someone is "online" that means that a registered user of this site has logged in recently and may in fact still be viewing content in this site.

A downside to these spiders I have noticed is, when a person does an image search on Fleda Claes Johansson, a number of images from this website pop up.

Jeanette Isabelle

Hmm, I thought the term Bot was the older of the two. I have seen references to bots since the day I got onto Usenet (hint: that was before wwww).

What determines how popular a site is? When I google anything which pertains to me, I get images from this forum. Are we really that popular?

Jeanette Isabelle

We have high Google ranking and updates on site and posts in the forum generally appear within minutes in results. Helps that we have been around a long time in Internet years and we are primarily a content site with lots of highly ranked links into the site.