Yahoo bot?

[Zap]

What is the 'Yahoo [Bot]' I'm sometimes seeing in the list of who is online?

[AngharadTy]

It just means that Yahoo (and sometimes Google, maybe other search sites) is crawling around NC, collecting stuff to submit to search engines. =)

[Jazzy]

Just to add to this: the bots have been crawling our forums for years, but phpBB3 gives them legitimate accounts of a sort (no posting access and limited privileges) in order to make their work more transparent. They used to show up as normal guests, occasionally multiple guests - Google in particular used to spawn a dozen guest accounts when viewing guests via the admin panel.

[oogabooga]

That explains a lot. Thanks, Jazzy.

[EofS]

It fascinates me how frequently they are indexing the site. And I seem to notice the Yahoo bot sticking around for longer times too.

And yet google's not showing anything more recent than the korbats. Actually, that's still pretty good going. Although it is a bit unfortunate that if you google Neocolours the phrase which it excerpts is "Due to a technical issue with the way Neocolours' pet display works, right now the images can't be shown on the main part of the site" which doesn't exactly make us look great *grin*

[Jazzy]

I can't be certain, but I'm fairly sure that the bots crawl the site and the forums separately, so they won't necessarily be indexing the rest of the site as often.

[EofS]

Ah. Interesting. I wonder if they measure the regularity of changes and base the frequency of crawling based on that.

It occurs to me that it might be handy to have a little widget in the coding for a forum which told search bots that it is a forum they're indexing. However I'm sure that would only make it easier for spambots too ;0)

[zebru]

We now have a Google Adsense [Bot] too :) I'm not sure why this amuses me, but it does.