Spiders..

[Kirsty]

You know when you are looking at who is online, well i have a question...

What is a 'Yahoo! Slurp Spider' does anyone know?

[Krazy Pengwin]

The Yahoo Slurp Spider is the same sort of thing as a Google Bot. It's a program that visits websites in the search engine's database and updates the entries at the search engine. This helps keep them up to date.

In some instances, these spiders, or bots, will visit sites not in the database, and in doing so, they can add sites that have not yet been submitted.

They also help to boost rankings in the search engines, although I am not 100% sure as to how that is accomplished.

[Kirsty]

Ahh so its just google/yahoo updating its resources?

[Krazy Pengwin]

As far as the Slurp Spider, then it's Yahoo updating, yes.