... but what might they be searching FOR ??
Answer: anything might be interesting for someone, somewhere, some day
If you search the net, then you don't actually search the net itself, i.e. your request in a search engine does not send hundreds of robots out search for relevant sites.
What happens is that the search engines all have their search-bots, which are constantly trawling the web and indexing everything they find. These index lists are held on the search engine servers.
Your request for any item will then cause these lists to be searched, not the web itself, to see if there is anything relevant. So your search is not of the web"as is" but "as was", ie. the last time that that search engine updated it's lists.
But as they are all constantly searching, the lists are fairly up-to-date
But ... we sometimes get the "slow down" effect, when too many are searching RootsChat at once
Bob
