What is a web robot?

Robot's are not normal Saxperience users... When a 'robot' visits sax-p a status bar appears under the "users online" area and will list the names of the robots currently online.

There are many detailed descriptions, which could be used to describe what a web robot is and how they tend to behave, but for the purpose of this FAQ I will try to keep things fairly simple.

A 'robot' is a term often used to refer to a search engines automated data gathering system, which continually wanders around the internet looking for fresh web site content to appear. Another popular name for a 'robot' is a 'spider'. Consider the analogy... ' a spider crawls around the web'

Robots are happily crawling around the internet, going from one web link to the next, looking at all of the text contained on the web pages they visit. They are essentially creating a huge database of information, detailing which information is contained on which web site.

Robots are owned and run by search engines. They collect all of the information, which is presented to you when you view a search engine results page (SERP).

The driver behind this is to try and ensure that when you search for a specific topic, the results that are presented to you are related to the topic in question... You can try this for your self by visiting a search engine and searching for 'Saxperience'... hopefully you will be directed back to this web site.

The search engine / robot relationship can become very complex and often secretive, as large companies rely on search engine results for advertising and to deliver revenue! Search engine dominance can be very important in some sectors.

Robot's visit some web sites more frequently than others... this generally depends on the 'quality' of the information the robot finds and the frequency of which the web site is updated.

Why can I see the robots?

Normally you would not be aware that a web robot is browsing a web site at the same time that you are... a neat bit of Saxperience code enables the robots to be identified so that you can see these important visitors of sax-p!

Common robots are Yahoo!, Googlebot, MSN and Ask Jeeves... Which other robots have you seen online?

I hope this information is of interest to you.

Simo