Inktomi Slurp?

[Dénes]

While looking at the current activity on the forum I noticed this: "Inktomi Slurp Contacting member via email April 10, 2009 02:28 am" What does it actually mean? Isn't this 'thing' an automated information gathering tool?

Gen. Dénes

[dragos]

Yes, Inktomi Slurp is the Yahoo automated web crawler, that tries to access every link it encounters in order to index new pages for the search engine. The forum reports the "contacting member" thing the moment the contact page is being accessed, but the little spider (which is in fact a script written by programmers to read relevant information such us keywords from Internet pages) found a dead end in there because it is treated as a guest and not a forum member (which has to be logged in). The same is valid for all indexing services, Google and all, you may find them doing weird stuff like contacting members or registering because they don't know the meaning of all the links they encounter.