TONIGHT! GATHER ONLINE AT 9PM

[tranceFusion]

i'm sorry, friday night just isn't a time i usually spend sitting at the computer..

[MLazar]

it was made back when the boards weren't closed to so many bots...

 

I don't understand what this means, can you please explain?

[L8 2 RISE]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe it refers to online searches, for example when you do a google search for fish, google quickly plows through thousands of websites for the word fish and then sorts them by relevance, that means that every time someone does a search related to this website, there would be a bot that looks at this website to see if it's relevant.

[MisterTang]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe it refers to online searches, for example when you do a google search for fish, google quickly plows through thousands of websites for the word fish and then sorts them by relevance, that means that every time someone does a search related to this website, there would be a bot that looks at this website to see if it's relevant.

 

No; Google has a crawler that indexes content, but it does not necessarily search it 'real-time'. That would be a TREMENDOUS amount of overhead to conduct a live crawl with every search.

 

I wasn't here, but I suspect most of the 'bots were from spammers and marketers trying to extract data (e-mails, phone numbers, PII) from posts, or even attempt to post spamvertisements. Basically, 'bots are programs written to automate something on the web, and that typically means spam or data harvesting.