The Bot Project is all about the webmaster community working together to build a picture of what search engine bots are doing, when they're doing it and where they're from.

First blog post

Well, here's the first blog post.

The site is built (although it's a little rough in places) and we're just about to use the code in some of our own sites to get the ball rolling.

We hope to have the tracking code in about 20 sites by the end of this week and we'll test it for a few weeks afterwards before we start talking to others about the project.

We've decided to make the tracking code as quick as possible by making it update a temporary table and then a cron job will "collect" data from that table and update everything properly - this is to ensure that there is as little delay as possible in the processing of robots.php.

We'll do some testing in terms of performance differences before / after and publish the results here over the next few days.

If you're looking to be involved at this very stage then please do contact us or post on the forums - any help is very much appreciated.

TOTD : I do not know with what weapons World War 3 will be fought, but World War 4 will be fought with sticks and stones - Albert Einstein.

--> Dan