Spiders?

[Keith Browning]

Since updating the forum software you may have noticed the Who's On Line feature has more information than it used to . I have been asked a few times what are spiders?

 

Creepy, cralwy little bugs... just kiddin!

 

A spider is a search engine web crawler. Here is a good explanation from Wikipedia:

Quote:

Web crawler (also known as a Web spider, Web robot, or—especially in the FOAF community—Web scutter

 

[1]) is a program or automated script that browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner. Other less frequently used names for Web crawlers are ants, automatic indexers, bots, and worms.

 

[2]This process is called Web crawling or spidering. Many sites, in particular search engines, use spidering as a means of providing up-to-date data. Web crawlers are mainly used to create a copy of all the visited pages for later processing by a search engine that will index the downloaded pages to provide fast searches. Crawlers can also be used for automating maintenance tasks on a Web site, such as checking links or validating HTML code. Also, crawlers can be used to gather specific types of information from Web pages, such as harvesting e-mail addresses (usually for spam).

 

A Web crawler is one type of bot, or software agent. In general, it starts with a list of URLs to visit, called the seeds. As the crawler visits these URLs, it identifies all the hyperlinks in the page and adds them to the list of URLs to visit, called the crawl frontier. URLs from the frontier are recursively visited according to a set of policies.

 

 

To add to this, when you see "Guests" or "Anonymous," those are people who have ventured to our forum portal and discovered they cant log in or any one of you fine Gents who arrive and log in. By the way, unless you are using a public computer you really don't need to log off.