Spiders

[MarcR]

I was looking at the home page of the forum. Could someone tell me what spiders, on the forum, are?

[Palustris]

Search engine robots looking at the site.
From Wikipedia
A Web crawler, sometimes called a spider or spiderbot and often shortened to crawler, is an Internet bot that systematically browses the World Wide Web and that is typically operated by search engines for the purpose of Web indexing (web spidering).[1]

[Maggi Young]

Eric (Palustris) is correct - these spiders are collecting info, often for archive material.
Usually, like most real spiders, utterly harmless!!

[MarcR]

Thank you Eric, and Maggie.

I thought I was reasonably computer-literate; but this is the first time I have heard that usage.

I have always thought of them as bots or robots.