CathInfo is a discussion forum, but it is also a website that can be indexed, or cataloged, by the search engines.
Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and the other search engines send out "bots" or "spiders" to crawl the Web for content to add to their massive databases. That way, when someone searches for "traditional Catholic fight" CathInfo will come up near #1 in the search results :wink:
If your website is really important, they will send those spiders out on a daily basis. Smaller sites might see them once a week, or once or twice a month.
Google has to constantly keep up with what new content is out there, since content is being added/changed constantly.
For a long time now, the CathInfo forum software has been able to distinguish between these automated spidering bots, and regular guest users. That is why the bots show up under their proper name, "Googlebot", "MSNbot" etc.
Matthew