Bing and Google?

[CitrusCat]

I see that on the "Registered Users" list, there is "Bing [Bot]" and "Google [Bot]", and the names are in purple. What's this all about? I've never seen anything like this before, can someone please explain it?

EDIT: Now there's "Google Feedfetcher", also in purple.
EDIT 2: "Google Feedfetcher" is gone now, never mind. But still, what on Earth is going on...?

[Crash32]

I've seen them on other forums, but I've never known what they do.

[Blade Genexis]

Those are bots that crawl the message board and gather content to be indexed on their designated search engine. It's a good thing they're here. They help increase our page rank. Not that we ever needed help with that. =P

[Coty]

To add to what blade said, these bots have browsed this board for some time, however, they were hidden, only recently were they un-hidden. I noticed directly after mooncow brought the site back up, why they were un-hidden now, I don't know I personally have always preferred them to hide... But I do see that it shows how they consume website bandwidth...

[CitrusCat]

What do you mean by "page rank"?

So far, I have seen Bing [Bot], Google [Bot], Google Feedfetcher, and Exabot [Bot]. Do they all do the exact same thing, or does each one have a slightly different purpose?

[Crash32]

Google: Google search results.
Bing: Bing search results.
Google Feedfetcher: Google feeds (?)
Exabot: For a site relating to that (?)