The Who's Online box to the right of the screen says there are 1606 guests and 321 Spiders online.

OK, What the heck is a "spider" in this context? And yeah, I know about the 8 legged hairy fuggers.

My understanding is that spiders crawl through forums such as this data mining. Taking whatever info they are programmed to gather. Phone numbers, email addresses, anything that you post.

Makes sense. Thanks for the reply SRM.

My daughter tells me that spiders are used to optimize website searches. She does that for a living. If some geezer types "over penetrates" into a search engine, spiders crawl over a bazillion websites looking for that phrase - and up pops 24 Hr Campfire.

She refers to us as geezers?

Spiders are also known as web crawlers. They search everything on internet for data. This is how google compiles and stores info on basically anything.

I can only guess but there's probably a multitude of google spiders searching this forum for a multitude of topics at any given time.

If you want a more detailed explanation look here ...

http://www.google.com/insidesearch/howsearchworks/crawling-indexing.html

"The journey of a query starts before you ever type a search, with crawling and indexing the web of trillions of documents."

"Our index is well over 100,000,000 gigabytes, and we�ve spent over one million computing hours to build it."

Dang, I resemble that description too.



Thanks for the info fellas.

No wonder Les don't come here anymore.