Rainwear Central Rainwear Forum

Hi Paul,

Could you clarify exactly what the "Google [bot]" that I have seen looged into the site is and whatit is doing here? It's fair to say that a "bot" in computing is usually a piece of software that has been given a repetitive task to do, usually data mining, and given the recent contraversy surrounding the way Google is collecting all sorts of information about people, I'm concerned about what exactly this thing is doing on the forum.

I may be paranoid, but they are out to get us you know!

Very good questions !

Google, and other search engines, have bots that are also called spiders. These spider bots crawl through the internet gathering meta and other data to help the search engines know what is going on for a give site. This is then used to direct searchers to the given site if they type in words in their search that matches what is found on the site.

I am very happy that this forum is aware when Googlebot crawls over it. Most sites are clueless about it - yet very page on the internet gets crawled over from time to time. By understanding the habits of these spiders it is quite easy to know when they are around. They look for specific HTML tags, come from specific IPs, look for specific files such as ROBOTS.TXT and many of them even report their user agent (browser name) as whatever bot they are.

Read more about the googlebot here : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Bot

Rest assured though - this site is not intended for data mining or any other venture except that that which its name implies.