was just vewing whos online, and i came across all the guests.. then i saw 'guest' users but they are called yahoo slurp spiders

what on earth is that?


i just searched google and just found mass confusion about it.. but does anyone have any leads as to what it is?

my guess just from mass confusion and its name would be something for the cache of the search engine

If i remember correctly, they're used by the search engine. I can't remember how, but yea, that's all you need to know .

they are search engine spiders.

ie. google/yahoo trawling over the page indexing/updating their information

where is this and what?

here we go vend http://www.lfsforum.net/online.php

Some forum thingies use special bot users to cut down on bandwith usage by offering to the Bots the printer/low bandwith version automatically. A way to test this is to grab the User Agent Switcher Extention for Firefox, switch to "Google Bot" and go to any forum you please and see what it looks like.

just looked again and saw an MSN Spider

but.. with the yahoo ones, is it really necesary to have 10 of them just crawling around

so wait, dustin, are you saying that they use the cache from that database like yahoo, to look around at forums using low bandwidth (im guessing, best for 56k or so users?)

No, they are automatic bots that visit every internetsite they can find and save them to their search-database (so you can find them on google.com , f.e.). So they try to visit really very internetsite. That means they try out every link on f.e. this forum. That of course consumes bandwith, as all images are transfered. To cut this down internet-site admins often remove the pictures from the websites when a bot visits it (the bots kindly tell the webserver who they are). So when a google-bot goes to some website to see what information it can find the internetsite will appear picture-less to it, but all valueable information is still logged. When a normal user visits the exact same site he will see all images and pictures.
That saves the admins some bandwith.

Vain

Actually, sometimes the bot doesn't save the Imaged version, because many forums that I visit thru Google, still gimme the basics, I have to press the full forum view button, It seems to be some, but not all vBulletin forums.