Just a question....

[Kode VioL8R]

When you're searching on this site under the "Who's Online" section, what/who is it referring to when it says "Yahoo! Slurp Spider" as a user is searching a particular forum? Just curious.

[mdshunk]

Spiders are the things that constantly try to search out everynook and cranny of every site on the net, so that when you search for something in Yahoo, Google, or whatever, it knows where to send you.

[Kode VioL8R]

So essentially when it says Yahoo! Slurp Spider is viewing the "Wiring an Attached Garage" thread it means someone is searching on Yahoo! using keywords that are contained in that article?

[Mr T]

They are called robots. When they find a site (or the admin pays the place to be included on a list), the robot will go through every link on the site and index it for the search engine. THere is a file that the admin can place within the site (robots.txt) that the good ones will look at.. it contains rules on where they can and cant go.

depending on the setups (here and there) the robot will scan the link names, or the content. If it is set to scan all the messages, you could put "jkaghkjhagsdklhlkasd" in a message and once it scans it all (could be a while if its just a random wandering bot), you could enter jkaghkjhagsdklhlkasd into google or yahoo and your message would be found.

Search for your name sometime.. All my college reports that they made us do online still come up.