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View Full Version : man that's some bullshit re: active user count



DJ Detroit Butcher
08-08-2005, 03:01 PM
i logged on here and saw that there were 12 people viewing leisure world, so i'm like "hell yeah" ... then i look and 10 of those are google spiders. dammit.

Chief
08-08-2005, 03:14 PM
lol....

pmFan
08-09-2005, 12:28 PM
HA! I never thought to look... I just thought we were busy with no one wanting to chat sometimes... Damn spiders! Let's start a Raid thread and see if that stops them!

wendyful04
08-10-2005, 10:10 PM
Wtcrap is a google spider?
It sounds like a mesh condom.

Etherspin
08-10-2005, 10:53 PM
a program by the google search engine that accesses the site to gain data about it i think.. no doubt someone smarter will jump in with a better explanation

PsychoMan
08-11-2005, 10:43 AM
In order for a search engine to allow users to search the web, it first has to know what is out there.

The easiest way to find out right now is to write a script that surfs the web. The code for a script like this is pretty simple:

- You point it at some random starting page
- If the page isn't already in the database (or is out of date), it indexes the page and updates the database
- Then it picks a link or two from the page and follows them.
- It is now at some other random page and the process starts all over again.

These scripts used to be called crawlers (or webcrawlers)... now I guess the term "spider" is being used more often.

A friend of mine managed to "trap" a Google spider on their web site once... it managed to find its way into a spot on his site that had circular internal links but no external links, and since his site is generated on the fly from scripts the spider thought it was always seeing new material. It was trapped for several days.

I have noticed that Google sends out a LOT more spiders than anyone else does. I guess that's why their database is always so current.

wendyful04
08-11-2005, 05:18 PM
Is it really a random starting page? Wouldn't they want to 'point it' at starting pages that are known to be affiliated with the topics that are the most-often quieried about by their users, not just some random pages?

I guess that's why Google is so well-rounded and why just about anything can be found through that search engine.

Look at me, trying to pretend I understand all of this! It's fascinating how detailed and planned-out the Internet has become.