What's up with this?

[roach]

Just went into "Who's Online" and saw something new. It says there are 4 members and 40 guests.
That's a little fewer than normal, but it was the guests' names that threw me:

MSNBot Spider (listed 20 times)

Google Spider

Google AdSense Spider

Yahoo! Slurp Spider

AskJeeves Spider

Any ideas what these are?

[indyracefan]

I noticed that earlier too. From what I've gathered these are search engine bots that gather information about a page or subject for their search engines. Apparently the more spiders the more often a subject is being indexed and more likely to show up quickly in the search engine results page.

[roach]

Yeah - after I posted, I went into Google and found that out. Looks like someone here (moderator) changed a setting for the forum.