Robots?

[Lazy Farmer]

Total: 1,808 (members: 127, guests: 1,222, robots: 459)
On the main page where it displays who is currently on BYC.
It shows members #'s, Visitor #'s & ROBOT #'s.
I noticed it as well on Back Yard Herds & TEG. They have fewer robots though.
What exactly are these robots and are they BYC robots or trolls or google ad generators?
"Danger Will Robinson".. hehe. sorry

 

[RodNTN]

Hmm, I've never noticed before. I'll have to go look for it I just saw it, a bit creepy

 

[Latestarter]

Robots are software search programs like "Google" and "Yahoo" among many, many others that constantly scan the web and catalog words so that when you or I type into the search engine, it knows where to send you. since there is always new material being added to the site, the search engines (read robots) have to routinely come back to see what has been added.

The search engines also follow you're travels to see where you go when they provide you a list of places. That way they can tally up the "hits" for each site and count visitor #'s.

Some day in the not to distant future, I imagine real robots will be doing your searches for you and then providing you what you've asked for.

 

[staceyj]

Aka, Siri lol

 

[Latestarter]

I was actually thinking more along the line of WALKING and talking "real" robots... But yeah, Siri is a first iteration...

 

[RodNTN]

Haha

 

[Nifty-Chicken]

Yup, most of them are friendly "spiders" or "web crawlers" from search engines etc.