What's this Google, Bing Thing?

[SherLOCKED221]

At the bottom the screen there's sometimes this thing that says "Google" or "Bing" next to where the names of the people logged in are.

What is this?

What does it mean?

 

If the names of people who are logged in go there, than why is there "Google" and "Bing" there?

 

(I'm probably being dense, but I’m curious)

[Undead Medic]

The Google and Bing names show up when the crawlers (spiders) that search engines use to index content are looking at the site. These bots scan the pages and navigate through the links in a site in order to discover relevant search terms to more correctly index the pages in their respective pages search results.

They are nothing sinister, they just help us rank higher in searches.

[SherLOCKED221]

Oh, I understand now, it actually sounds interesting.

 

Thanks Undead Medic!

[Alice Holmes]

Creepy bots that sneak into the system with cute names so that we might think they look innocent. Blighters.

[Carol the Dabbler]

I take it you're skeptical, Alice?

 

Maybe they're Moriarty's virtual minions :ph34r: sizing us up for a takeover!

[Pawse]

Four I know of:

 

Google

Bing

Yahoo

Facebook