I get nervous when I see the name "Yahoo! Slurp Spider" on who's online.

The name "Slurp Spider" is rather ominous and menacing if you ask me, and there are always quite a lot of them on there. The name "Slurp Spider" brings to mind a creepy crawly arachnid that is slurping everything up that it can find.

I recently tried to ask a guy at school who is a complete computer whiz, and who practically knows everything about computers, and even he could not tell me what a "spider" is, or what a "Yahoo! Slurp Spider" is. That made me even more nervous.

I truly hope that these "Yahoo! Slurp Spiders" are not slurping up the board, or hurting the board in any other way.

From what I understand, "spiders" are independent search engines run by the biggies - google, yahoo, etc. They set them to search on certain criteria or groups of criteria, and they use the results to populate their pages. I think that's basically the idea, but others probably know more than I.

No, we got you for that, don't we.

Ok Bola,

I saw something called "Yahoo! Slurp Spider", and it sounded nasty and menacing. I asked somebody else about it who is a whiz who knows practically everything about computers. He didn't know what it was. So I thought that someone on here might know what it was.

That's all. There's no reason to get cross.

Your freind isn't quite as techno-savvy as he'd have you believe if he can't explain a simple device such as a spider.

The web - a spider, what does a spider do on a web? It trawls from one page to another using hyperlinks (points where a web line crosses another webline)... It is, as you imagined, 'slurping' up content.
This is actually a good thing as it 'slurps' every peice of text. The idea being that when a search criteria is entered into 'yahoo search engine', it could pick up ANY part of a text from here and have it referenced.

e.g. someone searching for a quote about Joe Blogs, could by all accounts pick up this very post of mine just because it now has the term "Joe Blogs" in it...twice even. The more relevent the content to the search criteria the more likely it will show higher up the ranks.

This way, people searching for various and unrelated terms MAY just get a lesson...