What's a spider?????

[Down Deep]

I was looking at the Who's Online bar and noticed that it listed 25 Spiders online. What's a spider?

[DTro]

It's basically a search bot.

So if I was to do a Google search for some keywords, Google then sends out it's spiders to find those words. So if 25 people were doing a google or yahoo search for "Ice fishing in MN". There's a good chance those spiders would be here telling Google to send the user here for all the great info .

[harvey lee]

I thought it was a little long legged bug that crawled around in the basement.

[delcecchi]

That's not exactly how google does it. They send out bots ahead of time and make an index of the web. If they didn't, it would take hours to do one search.

[Kyle Sandberg]

delcicchins got it right. Google and the other search engines send out spiders to basically get all the info off of the websites and store it in their archives. When a search is run, the computer only need to find those keywords and provide the link.

So in a way, thank the spiders for the ease of use of the web.

[DTro]

Well I was sort of right

[JimBuck]

This is a little off topic but....What kind of internet connection do you think Spiderman has?

[Glockwinger]

This is a little off topic but....What kind of internet connection do you think Spiderman has?

I don't know, but he has a great web connection

[Northlander]

LOL!