Post are quickly sent to google

[davesexcel]

I thought I would search the web to see if there was any info on the mouse over question.
http://www.excelforum.com/excel-prog...ml#post2216340

The above post was already on google.

[teylyn]

I noticed that, too, with other threads. But no wonder with the spiders on here all the time!

[davesexcel]

Could you explain what a Spider realy does teylyn?
I thought a Spider was a Web Designer..LOL

[teylyn]

Oooohh, webmaster 101. Lemme see.

Search engines have so-called spiders, or search-bots, little applications that crawl the web and take note of new web pages to include in the search engine's index. Only indexed pages can show up in the search engine results, so webmasters are interested in getting all their pages indexed.

When you launch a new web site, you'll typically tell the search engines that it exists. There are tools with Google and Yahoo and all, to register a new web site with them. If you're lucky, the new page will be indexed straight away and will show up in searches if you've done your SEO homework. (If you're not so lucky, you may have to wait quite a few months to be indexed. I know a lot of angry web masters whose sites have not made it into the Google index in over a year. )

Once your home page is indexed, you probably won't have the time to notify the search engine every time you change something on your site, add a page, etc. but since your home page is indexed with the search engine (or because it was found some other way), the spiders do that job for you.

Starting at some point in the web, probably with the search engine's index, the spiders go from link to link and take note of keywords and content of the page, as well as follow links to other pages. Indexed pages are visited by spiders on a more or less regular basis. Web masters want the spiders to come as often as possible. Web sites that change frequently will be visited more often. Stale web sites get hardly any visits from bots.

If you don't register your new web site with a search engine, but you have many incoming links (i.e. other sites linking to your site), chances are good that the bots will find your site following one of those links and you'll make it into the index via that route.

It's all a rather complicated algorithm and search engines don't necessarily share how it all works in detail.

But as I write this, there are 13 spiders active on this site, from Yahoo, MSN, Google and AskJeeves.

Since this site changes virtually every minute, spiders come back often to look for new stuff and report that back to the mothership.

You can see what the spiders are currently doing by looking at the "Who's online" link in the Quick Links menu above. Registered members will be listed first, then other guests and spiders. To just look at the currently active spiders, use the filter at the bottom of the screen, or click this link

http://www.excelforum.com/online.php...=1&who=spiders

hth

[JBeaucaire]

Very cool!

I had noticed last year that when I googled to get some ideas for a question I was working on I would find the question itself listed prominently near the top of the search...I knew why, but now I know "how", too!

Thanks...