Topic: Curiousity - Spider?

[tiberianius]

I have looked through the boards, though not sufficiently that I have looked everywhere, just enough that I find myself settling for asking rather than going mad.

At the bottom of the homepage is the Users Online tab thing. (2nd to last element when I scroll all the way down on my screen other than the operating system. Anyhow... I see how many guest, users but then comes buddies, spiders, and hidden.

What are spiders? Like, I enjoy playing monsters, but what did I miss? Is this a title or term I should know? My curiosity is aroused! Please either point me to the thread describing such things or let me know what it is!

Thank you, and I apologize for being dramatic. Somewhat.

-Tiberianius

[Lyrical]

Dark mysterious answers contained within. Once you know the truth you can never go back

((I'm just kidding it's not that scary ))

Wiki can explain it in some detail:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_crawler

Short version: It's a way for search engines to look for and collect publicly available data.  That's how they know what to link you to when you search for something.

[Oniya]

A 'spider' is a program that is used by search engines to generate search results.  It got its name because it's literally going from link to link, 'crawling the (World Wide) Web'.  In fact, one of the earliest search engines was called 'WebCrawler', and had a spider mascot.

[tiberianius]

Well I saw that it was with the registered people, so well I assumed it was a type of role. I guess having a search engine is akin to a person in some fashions. It's definitely an active interface.

Thanks for the answers.

[Vekseid]

They're tracked separately specifically because they are not people.