There was an old lady who swallowed a spider,
That wiggled and jiggled and tickled inside her.
I don’t know about anywhere else in the country, but Woking is teeming with spiders at the moment. Dew is coating their webs in the mornings and later in the day you can watch them waiting for dozy insects to get trapped.
I have noticed recently, that the world wide web also seems to be full of spiders. The chemical forums, for example, lists the number of spiders that are present on their site:
So what are these spiders?
As far as I can tell they are computer programs that are used to browse webpages making lists of the hyperlinks that they contain. These new hyperlinks are then added recursively to the list of webpages that the program needs to visit. This process then forms a very large index of webpages that can be used by search engines to retrieve information.
Wikipedia writes about these spiders under the heading Web Crawler.
“Spider” has also come up in the names of two web applications that I have been introduced to while doing my job at Nature Protocols:
ChemSpider – Database of chemical structures
SPIDER – System for Processing Image Data from Electron microscopy and Related fields
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly.
I don’t know why she swallowed that fly—
Perhaps she’ll die.
What a horrible poem. Poor arachnophilic lady.
He he. She only dies after she swallows the horse.
Jenny also doesn’t like the poem very much (see comments here)- as a child I was more freaked out by Wee Willy Winkie as I had trouble sleeping and couldn’t tell the time.