Yahoo! Slurp Spider

[WhiteD3]

I just had a look to see who was online. 73 "guests", many of whom were or was the "Yahoo! Slurp Spider".

I gather the Yahoo! Slurp Spider is some kind of search listing program? What's it actually doing?

[Ben]

What's it actually doing?

It's a program that automatically trawls the web, copying and saving data into a database.

Slurp's FAQ puts it pretty succinctly: "The Yahoo! Slurp crawler collects documents from the Web to build a searchable index for search services using the Yahoo! Search engine."
- Yahoo!'s Web Crawler (http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/search/webcrawler/)