Google Bot

[Blue70]

A member called Google Bot? What's that all about?

Blue

[dickiesam]

Hi Blue,
Google Bot? Where and when? I must have missed spotting it.

[Blue70]

Hi DS

If you look at the registered users on the board index it often appears there.

Blue

[dickiesam]

Hi Blue,
I can't see Google Bot as a Registered User, his/her/its name not being in the Gs. So I think it is a real electronic robot, aka spybot, crawling around our site at the behest of Google. It is how they search and scan the web recording data. Scary....

[MaryA]

I don't know all the ins and outs, but I believe it's all to the good since it's how our posts get logged in google searches. Hopefully they call out to some of our unknown rellies who are looking to make contact with us, when they spot the posts in google they might come here and meet you. Well thinking about it, that's what happened for one of my posts a few years ago and now I have a lovely 5th cousin who has become a firm friend.

[dickiesam]

There are other 'bots' too, being used for quite nefarious purposes such as collecting email addresses 'exposed' on a forum without being 'doctored' in some way, and scouring the web for access to peoples' address books via those email addresses.

[Blue70]

I spotted an MSN Bot on here before. What next the Daleks or the Cybermen?

Blue

[dickiesam]

I suspect it could be the Yahoos, from Gulliver's Travels by Jonathon Swift.
From Wiki... Swift describes them as, filthy and with unpleasant habits, resembling human beings far too closely for the liking of protagonist Lemuel Gulliver, who finds the calm and rational society of intelligent horses, the Houyhnhnms, far preferable. The Yahoos are primitive creatures obsessed with "pretty stones" they find by digging in mud, thus representing the distasteful materialism and ignorant elitism Swift encountered in Britain. Hence the term "yahoo" has come to mean "a crude, brutish or obscenely coarse person".

[Lee Layland]

Google bot is Google's way of indexing the world wide web.

The world wide web as we know is just a collection of separate pages with no order whatsoever, Google (and Yahoo et al) use bot's to index the internet to provide us all with the pages we want when we search.

This was originally done by hand (imagine how long that took) - until a programmable way was devised and called bots - they are sometimes also known as spiders - as they crawl the web.

In order to enable the forums to be indexed by Google, Yahoo etc we have to make their Bot's members. Otherwise they would not be able to search the forums properly.

Hope this clears it up.