Spiders? as related to folks on the site now

[cskipper]

When I looked at the bottom of the page it said that there were a number of members, a number of guests and a number of spiders. In this context, what are spiders?

 

[DaveO]

Those are search engine "bots" who are viewing the site looking for information that someone has entered into a seach engine.
I am sure there is a more techincal explaination, but I am not the guy to give it.
Dave

 

[McRabbet]

Web spiders (or web crawlers) are small script programs that are sent out by the major search engine sites like Yahoo and Google to keep their index files up to date. they send back keywords and link information so searches on those sites are kept up to date. It is common to see 10-15 spiders working in the background here all the time.