The number of online users, especially the "guests" can be a confusing statistic. In some instances, especially with ISP's like Qwest, Rogers, Sympatico, etc. have multiple gateways to the
Internet. A
single user can appear on a site as sometimes 10-15 individual IP addresses. Most
Internet search engines such as
Google, Alta Vista, Ask Jeeves etc. will be in constant contact with web sites as they index them for their search databases. Most also have multiple gateways that will appear as "guests" because they're not registered and will skew the user statistics dramatically. At any given time I can identify 3 or 4 search engines crawling our (CCG) web servers.