What are the bots?

[Ypsi]

just curious about the "bots that appear in the users online area, like Bing[Bot] and Google[Bot] what do they do?

[Michigan Railfan]

I agree. What are they? I do have a theory, though.

The bots are Google and Bing, two of the biggest and most known search engines on the web. My guess is that they are possibly "users" that are always online to display search queries. As in, if someone searches something train related, Google and Bing would show links to this website. It may be like this for all websites, but for some reason only this site shows them.

[~Z~]

The site recognizes when google, bing, and various other search engines are crawling the site. Basically these search engines keep visiting the site, they check for updated pages, which is basically every time someone posts anything, and the search engines will browse through, updating their own databases. Googleadsense bot stops by a lot too to try to figure out what ads to display on the threads. Our site is crawled many times a day, so google keeps a very up-to-date snapshot of what is on the site so they can direct users at us with fresh information.

Bots crawl most other sites..some sites turn off the crawling ability by altering their robots.txt file in the root directory. I let the bots crawl as it really helps to drive in new users, and we have plenty of bandwidth to let them roam.

[Ypsi]

ahhhhhhh i always wondered about them and now i know

[Jetlink]

I let the bots crawl as it really helps to drive in new users,

That's how I found your site.

[GR Ron]

Glad we go to the "Bots"tom of that!!!!!!

[DelayInBlock]

I have a really stupid sounding question, forgive me, but what is bandwidth? I have another question for later, but my fingers are sore from typing messages all night! Ha!