What's a Google Spider?

[Jenya]

I've seen them listed along with the Guests on the Who's on Line section.

Anybody know what this means?

[TJ]

It means the Google crawler is spidering the message board posts for the Google index. There are some other spiders like Lycos, Ask Jeeves, Scooter, Fast-Webcrawler, Slurp (Inktomi), and Turnitinbot.

It should bring some additional traffic to the boards as the old ones weren't really spiderable.

Spider. A program that automatically fetches web pages and feeds them to search engines. (It's called a "spider" because it crawls around the web.) Because most web pages contain links to and from other pages, a spider can start almost anywhere. As soon as it recognizes a link to another page, it goes off and fetches it. Large search engines have many spiders working simultaneously. Also known as a crawler.