Question for our resident experts

[Cole Parker]

It should be well known by now that most things computer are a befuddlement to me. But someone can probably answer this.

Recently, when on the forum, I see at the bottom of the page, where it shows who is in the forum at that moment, it lists Google.com as a participant. I'd never seen that before. Now it is common. But what does it mean?

Cole

[Trab]

I don't know what, but something's going on. I had to log in, and I haven't had to do that in almost 2 years; normally it's automatic. I barely remembered my log in information.

[colinian]

It should be well known by now that most things computer are a befuddlement to me. But someone can probably answer this.

Recently, when on the forum, I see at the bottom of the page, where it shows who is in the forum at that moment, it lists Google.com as a participant. I'd never seen that before. Now it is common. But what does it mean?

Cole

Cole,

Google is a search engine. It uses a bot to collect new information from every website, including AD. When you see "google.com" that tells you that the Google search bot is currently looking at the AD forum and collecting new and updated posts.

You can test this by finding something unique in an older post, the doing a Google search for it.

Colin

[TalonRider]

Yahoo, Bing, and Facebook are among the many bots that visit sites.

[Cole Parker]

So you're saying the forum reader ID relating to Google has always been there, I've just happened on it lately by accident. OK, I guess. I sort of wondered if what you said was true, and I merely stumbled on them when they were collecting us into their vast vacuum.

C

[E.J.]

I assume that the 35-40 "guests" all trying to log on at once are spam bots and not really people.

This seams to be new, At least the high numbers are.

[TalonRider]

Not all the guests are bots. Most will be human.

Not all bots may be identified as such. For example, I can go into one of my control panels and look up some stats that will tell me exactly what bots have been to my site. I can also check the list of the last 300 visitors and get for the bots, I can get the IP they visited under, then go to another control panel and assign it the bot name it was under.

In case you're wondering, the forum software is set up so that bots can't join.

[The Pecman]

In case you're wondering, the forum software is set up so that bots can't join.

True, but: they are data mining all the information on each page. And in some cases, there are tracking mechanisms that tell where you go and what you're doing on the web.

Time Magazine has a pretty interesting story about this phenomena in this week's issue. I've known about this for a long time, but I don't doubt this will give some people pause as to how they're constantly being shadowed on the web.