Whats a Yahoo! slurp spider?

[ScottS]

Anytime i go to the "who's online" page, there is a bunch of 'users' named Yahoo! slurp spider and they are all viewing different things.

Whats up with that? Should i be scared of these spiders?

 

[DigiJay]

I'm pretty sure it has something to do with searches.. when someone does a search for something photography related on yahoo.. a "spider" will find the info on this forum and list it as a search result... same goes for google bots...
I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that's what they do.

 

[ferny]

They go along and crawl websites slurping up info so that when people search they get results.

 

[LaFoto]

They aren't real persons, but the "robots" the big search engines employ to look through anything out there to update their sites. How else would the big search engine sites such as Yahoo! or Google etc KNOW about what's out in the www?