bots and spiders?

[SlickNick]

what are bots and spiders? for instance, yahoo bots and that kind of thing.
i'v noticed they log on. what are they doing?


   peace, S~N

[Syd]

They are search engine crawlers and are caching our pages.

[SlickNick]

Crawlers?  Whats caching?

[kemp]

Here is a link that describes what caching is (at least on Google's search engine) - //http://www.googleguide.com/cached_pages.html

Basically, the way people find websites, and our forum, is often through search engines. Yes, sometimes people come directly from a link at Erowid or something but, we're talking search engines now.  The only way to have our forum show up in Google or Yahoo is to request that the search engine(s) "index" our pages. If they agree they will program their "bot" or "spider" or what ever you may call it to come to the site and start viewing and logging pages. They rank some pages better than others and those with a higher rank show up higher in the search results (when you do a search at Google.com for instance).

Some search engines even save a copy of the pages it views so that people can click on the "cached link" at Google when the site may be down. Saving a copy of a web page is caching. To cache something in memory on a computer is another way to use the word.

Hope this helps some.   :baby-taptap:

[DrYRHead]

The method also can reference a list of similar links, or other e-pages with like data.