Bot/Spider What are these?

[Zero Beat]

Bots & Spiders

What are these things?
Ive seen them when i have been bored
and looking at the "Who's Online" thing.
Are they the things that get the information for the search engines? Like Google?

Thxs :)

[Donkey]

Yes, they crawl websites looking for results on Google, Bing, Ask!, Yahoo etc.

[MoveAlong]

Yes. The gather the information for sites like Google, Ask, Yahoo, etc.

[Cromm]

Both are programs used by companies and individuals for various purposes, usually to gather data, but sometimes more.

Spiders 'crawl' the internet by following all the links in a page, going to those pages, following the links on those pages, and so on and so on. Usually logging information as they go.

A 'bot' is simply short for 'robot'. It's an automated program that has no direct human input. Bots can be used to do many things, information gathering included.

All spiders are bots, but not all bots are spiders.