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what is a "spider"

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death:
When I was looking to se who was online here it said "Yahoo spider" MSN Spider"  what does that mean?

just curious

fuzzytomcat:
Hey Death,

As Per Wikipedia - A web crawler (also known as a web spider, web robot, or—especially in the FOAF community—web scutter) is a program or automated script which browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner. Other less frequently used names for web crawlers are ants, automatic indexers, bots, and worms.

Some web sites (Google, Yahoo, & MSN) do this all the time on forums to keep updated because of the type of traffic they have.  If your on a lot of popular forums with the same screen name, you can google your screen name and see the spiders at work.

 ;D

death:
ahhh that makes sense..... thanks  didnt know there was such a creature witha name.

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