13 Robots on line Do robots do a lot of hiring?

[+ purplekow]

I noticed there is a box which denotes how many members are on line and their names, how many non-members are online and how many robots. I am not sure what the designation robot signifies in this context. Also like that the little green arrow in the upper left hand corner of someone's avatar indicates that they are on line. It makes stalking the hot men on this forum a lot easier. It is also easier for them to stalk me. Yoo Hoo fellas how about we shares stalks?

[+ honcho]

Being possibly a little humor impaired, I'm wondering if the indigo bovine already knows this and is

asking the question for comic effect, but I'm going to respond as if the question is sincere . . .

 

The way google and yahoo can look things up for you is by having (some of ) their computers visit web pages,

collect the contents, and index the resulting data.

 

The state of having a web page retrieved by another computer for the purpose is called

"being visited by a robot".

 

There is a convention for authors of web sites to indicate the extent to which they are

willing to have the content retrieved, by placing a page called "ROBOTS.TXT" at the top

level of the web site.

 

Another ickier name in lieu of robot is "web-crawler".

[+ purplekow]

I thank you for information. One of the great perquisites of being thought of as funny is that you can almost always cover up ignorance with an alibi of unfortunate or ill conceived humor. In this case, I am lacking the expertise and it seems I could have gotten away with that ignorance if I had just kept my mouth shut and my hands off my....keyboard.

[Rudynate]

I thank you for information. One of the great perquisites of being thought of as funny is that you can almost always cover up ignorance with an alibi of unfortunate or ill conceived humor. In this case, I am lacking the expertise and it seems I could have gotten away with that ignorance if I had just kept my mouth shut and my hands off my....keyboard.

 

OTOH, you know something today that you didn't know yesterday. That's worth something, isn't it.

[+ SundayZip]

Robots are also used extensively by organizations to monitor availability and performance of their websites. Let's say an online retailer has set a goal of having their website up and running 99.8% of the time and another goal to have product searches take no more than 3 seconds to complete. They will setup robots to emulate customers who are accessing the site and doing product searches. The robot will log the website's performance and automatically alert the technology support geeks when targets are not being met. The logs are also used to analyze performance over time. So, if performance turns out to be consistently sluggish on Mondays from 1pm to 3pm, the technology geeks can adjust the servers to give the website more juice during this time period.