Just a random question...

[Enzo]

Who are Google, Yahoo!, and Bing? I see them on here occasionally and they are invisible. Is it a really awesome organization of invisible RPers who invite fabulous people to join their party and become a search engine? Or is it just the company's stalking us?

[FreelanceWizard]

Those are the site identifying the search engines (by IP address). It does that so I can, if so choose, treat them as users and adjust what they can see. I don't do that, though.

[Coatleque]

When you see them listed as "users" in the list, it means the search engine "spider-bots" are crawling the forums and recording words. Yes, that means everything you post here is in google's database. Creepy, right?

 

Technically in a few days if I search the phrase "Creepy, right?", this page will show up somewhere in the list. Albeit, on page 51,867 out of 8,175,312. But still there.

 

As FreelanceWizard stated, he has the ability to lock down what threads these spiders are allowed to access.

[Nebbs]

When you see them listed as "users" in the list, it means the search engine "spider-bots" ...

 

That's what I read... "eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeek!" *seeks higher ground, like a chair!