More of a question...

[PhysX]

this is not a suggestion, merely a question. At the bottom of the forum where it says guests that have visited the forum, what exactly are those yahoo slurp spiders, and the other spiders?

[BoyEngland]

I believe guest are generally people who have visited who are either new to the site or have just not logged in. (You will probably know that)

Spiders and the like are basically advertising. They are the things that get the forums on Google search, Yahoo search, etc.

When you do a Google search (or any other), it sends these "spiders" out to all websites to look for something relevent to what you searched for. It then returns it to Google and then it is sorted into an order of relevance and sometimes the number of hits the site has had whether it be recently or since it was started.

I may be wrong somewhere but thats my understanding and I am fairly sure I am pretty much right.

[Libertine]

The "Visitors" are actual people. The "Guests" are a combination of "Visitors" and bots/spiders. So the Guests is not a reliable number if your wanting to know the amount of people that have visited over the last 24 hours. Stick with "Visitors".

Boy England's evaluation of spiders is fairly accurate.

[Dboyz-x.etown]

Except spiders aren't sent out every time you search, instead they're crawling the web constantly tagging pages with certain content. Then google takes a plain text snapshot of the site and stores it on their servers. Then when you run a search query, it brings up the pages with relevant content.

Well, that's a half decent explanation

[Conflicted]

Originally Posted by Dboyz-x.etown

Except spiders aren't sent out every time you search, instead they're crawling the web constantly tagging pages with certain content. Then google takes a plain text snapshot of the site and stores it on their servers. Then when you run a search query, it brings up the pages with relevant content.

And that's why, after somebody deletes their myspace, you can still find it on google, and hit the CACHE link, and see their profile in it's former glory......like my gay US Government Teacher's.