Webbers Corner

Maybe this is a N00b Question, but where it shows who is signed in, it said camcool21, Gaz and GoogleBot.  camcool21 and Gaz were links to their profile's and googlebot was just text. What's that all about?

GoogleBot is Google's Search engine spider, to crawl our website for content, it is on the list so Dave and I can see it. So its not an actuall member, it is recognized by its IP Address

You will also find sometimes find Yahoo and MSN are down there but Google is by far the most commonly found there.

googlebot took over 1gb of bandwidth from me this month.

they have took a load of mine aswell.  i think they live on my forum lol.  it i rare you don't see them on this site.

can't wait to actually get indexed on google tho.

googlebot doesnt show up on phpbb, but i see them in the admin panel, and in my stats.

Yeah they also show in my smf forum and they always visit everyday.  But its good if they are your frequent visitors right?

A question from a layperson. How does Googlebot help and why does it take so much space? Is it really of any use - and if so - can I use it anywhere on my computer ?

googlebots search the content of the site which is then indexed for searches.  there are often more and on for a longer period on forums and larger sites to a normal one because of the continuous updates and the amount of content required for reading and checking.

without them no sites would appear of google, yahoo, msn or any other search engine.

you can create different bots to run on your computer but you cannot use google bots as they are only for web use.

Googlebot lives on my forums also. I am on at least 10 hours a day, and not once for the past month has it not been on there indexing away. As far as I'm concerned, googlebot can take up 6TB of bandwidth. I'm just glad it likes me! If you have a google webmaster account, you can control the googlebot, like the crawl rate, which I of course set to fast.