What are spiders?

[GaryVoshol]

On the main page, it tells how many users, guests and spiders are reading the boards. What are spiders?

[KenWittlief]

automated search engines, like Google and Yahoo?

[EricH]

automated search engines, like Google and Yahoo?That's how my dad explained it to me. They're spinning the World Wide Web.

[Madison]

Spiders crawl through websites, following links to other pages and ranking those pages against other sites so as to help increase search result relevancy on sites like Yahoo! and Google.

[Mike AA]

some spiders are also copying the whole webpage such as wayback machine. They copy and store for future reference.

-Mike