dingostew.com

this may seem like a stupid question but what is a bot??

A bot (or robot) on the internet is a little program that scouts the internet and retrieves information, mostly for search engines.

For example, if the google bot visits this site at noon, and you search for something on google thats on this site, it'll show up in the search results, however, say if i post a new message at 12:15, then it wont show up in google results.

When the bot returns next time, and THEN you seach for my new message, then it'll show up in the google results.

Basically, if you ever wondered how google works, it sends bots out to "download" all the websites on the net and save them to the google servers, then when u go to search on google, it searches all the websites its downloaded and finds the matching results for what u searched But of course when u click the results, it takes u to the original website.

thats why sometimes when u search for something and get the result, its different, coz the page has been updated since the google bot has last been there.

Yahoo and MSN have their own bots, as well as a lot of other small search engines around the internet.

thats pretty cool!

You can stop bots from accessing pages too, like admin sections etc

ye i know, sure im always fiddlin with me robots.txt.

also, why do u mention my admin section? was that u searching for it on google? on me google top searches, it kept showing up that someone was googlin for the control panel!