>From the Rootsweb Digest: GEEK SPEAK. Thanks to Leigh Compton, Dale Schneider, and Tim Pierce, who collaborated on the following explanation. SPIDER. Playing on the analogy of a web, as in World Wide Web, a spider is a software program that regularly searches (or "crawls") through the Internet, indexing all the text in all the pages on the Web. Spiders allow search services to keep up with the new content being added to the Web, without having to depend on the creators of that content to index it themselves. Because a spider's job is to travel automatically through the links on a Web site, it can do this at lightning-quick speeds, processing hundreds or thousands of pages per second. That kind of rate can easily swamp a fully loaded Web server and take it right off the Net. On occasion, RootsWeb has been visited by a poorly designed spider from another genealogy site on the Web, one which hits our machines so hard that we've been forced to block traffic from them for several weeks at a time.