Silly Forum Question: What's a Spider?

On the right side of the forum screen it says "Who's Online" and it lists a number registered, a number of guests, and then it lists a number of "Spiders".

What the heck are "Spiders" in this context?

Just wondering.

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukka, and a Joyful Holiday to all ... especially to the brave men & women serving to protect us,

Ken K.

Spiders are web crawlers!!

Google and others use software to crawl the web and index things for searching and other purposes. In keeping with the whole web theme these tools are known as spiders.

-Eric

Think of "spiders" as the Roomba vacuum cleaners of the web--i.e. automated software that crawl around every nook and cranny of websites 24/7, sucking up text and images as they go.

That's how these search engines can catalog all those millions and millions of webpages in their database. I'm not sure what percentage of all available websites are indexed by search engines now, but thanks to spiders, it must be quite high.

I always thought that "7spidersonline" would be a rather amusing 'net handle. But then I have a weird sense of humour.

OK,Then that means the Guests are,Actually Lurking/Lurkers?

Yup. Or they could be members who aren't logged in.

I note that when I am checking this forum, sometimes I am shown as registered (like right now) and sometimes not. Is there a limit to the number of registered members who can be displayed? Idle curiosity question only - it's a quiet rainy day here is SoCal.