What's a spider?

[PancaKe]

I was looking at the "Who's Online" section of the forums, where you can see what everyone is looking at, and I noticed that there were several of these "spiders" browsing our forums. There was one called Google Spider and one called Ask Jeeves Spider... and that's all I remember.

But what are they?

[Heald]

They're actually called 'Web crawlers', however, since a spider is an actual literal web crawler, they're nicknamed spiders. They're basically automatons that go through every web page gathering information for search engines to keep them up-to-date and will periodically return to find new pages or to see if existing pages have changed or have disappeared and will send this information back to its respective search engine.

They're nothing to be worried about, unlike real spiders, or even phone spiders.

[PancaKe]

Ah yeah. That makes sense. Although web creepy crawlies give me the creeps still I'll just avoid what they're looking at. lol

Phone spiders I'm assuming crawl in your phone and listen to your conversations? Correct? As opposed to spiders that live in your handset....

[Heald]

A short video on Phone Spiders

[Mikachu Yukitatsu]

So, when I type 'truth about mikachu yukitatsu' on Google, spiders come and get the link to TPM for me?

[Jeff]

No, they look the link up before hand so they know where it is when someone searches for it.

[Asilynne]

They slurp your threads o.o

[Blademaster]

Hey, Asi.

[Asilynne]

OMG THE RAPE SPIDER IS BACK! *runs around screaming*

[Crystalmaster Mike]

Is there a difference between a spider and a 'bot? I think there might be, though I'm not sure...

[Heald]

A bot is a general term for any kind of automated process on the 'net. For example, bots that sign-up to the forums and spam them to hell and back are still bots, and bots that come and slurp data for Google are still bots.

[Jeff]

Spiders have the specific purpose of serving search engines, bots are more generic. They're pretty much any program that browses the Web for whatever reason. One type, I'm sure everyone here is familiar with is the spambot, which joins forums just to post ads.

[DarkestLight]

rape spider LOL.