[Salal Sue]

How private are postings? Do Google or other search engines crawl around here gathering everything--- preserving all messages for eternity in cyberspace?

[Salal Sue]

Please could one of the mods...er...custodians answer this...I came to computers late and am still trying to understand how the internet works..

---just want to know where my postings go when they leave my keyboard......and the word "web crawler" is rather ominous---I hate spiders.......ugh!

[Libertarian]

Yes, Google looks into all forums on every site connected to the Internet. Do not say anything here or elsewhere that you would not want to see on the front page of your News Paper. Any site that tells you that it is Google free is lying to you.

[member31]

google a phrase from here and see if you get a hit . . .

[Yammy]

All forums sooner or later are web crawled by Google AND other search engines.

I have Googled my user name and yes, I can pull up posts on other forums, here is still pretty new so not sure what would be there, that is why many people use a nick name and not their REAL names...

[MrO]

Google can't crawl posts in a forum that requires login to access - like CE. So if a particular part of CE can't be accessed without a password, then Google isn't going to see it.

[PurpleReaper]

Maybe Google doesn't crawl through password protected sights, but any "guest" (including presumably the web crawlers) can see our posts -- they just can't post back...

maybe we should require biometric scans including our financial statements to get into CE...