Robot TUG visitors?

[RX8]

I happened upon current visitors and see a number of "robots" viewing threads. Just curious what this is all about.

 

[dioxide45]

Also, how does the BBS know it is a Robot?

 

[DaveNV]

As I recall: Bots are spiders that crawl across the web, collecting data, key words, analyzing user data, and capturing information to be used in web searches and such. It helps make search engines more accurate, to return more current data. That's part of why you can do a Google search on a current event, and find websites that talk about it. (Try doing a google search for a thread title you posted today, and see if it doesn't get returned in the search results.)

I think bots self-identify themselves so they aren't banned by the software.

Dave

 

[RX8]

As I recall: Bots are spiders that crawl across the web, collecting data, key words, analyzing user data, and capturing information to be used in web searches and such. It helps make search engines more accurate, to return more current data. That's part of why you can do a Google search on a current event, and find websites that talk about it. (Try doing a google search for a thread title you posted today, and see if it doesn't get returned in the search results.)

I think bots self-identify themselves so they aren't banned by the software.

Dave

After trying a few key words, I found a thread from back in 2016.

Techno-idiot question on "Robots" on TUG...

I inadvertently stumbled into an itemized listing of "who's on line" on TUG a few minutes ago. I promptly saw "Robot: Baidu" listed many times, for numerous TUG forum threads, most apparently conducted at the very same time within recent minutes. Clicking on the word "Baidu" promptly revealed a...

tugbbs.com

 

[TUGBrian]

yep, are usually search engine spiders

 

[sponger76]

Every time I hear about search engine spiders, aka webcrawlers, it makes me think of those machines in the Matrix movies.

 

[ScoopKona]

This is why searching on Google with "site:name-of-website.com" is often more accurate than searching the website. There are MANY that are best searched with google as opposed to internal searches.

 

[TUGBrian]

we have a tool that does that for you as well! https://search.tug2.net

 

[simpsontruckdriver]

Or this one, featuring Gene Simmons (KISS) and Tom Selleck about killer spider robots.

TS