What does it mean to "ping"

I often read suggestions about "ping" your article and ping your website.

What does "ping" means, and what are the benefits of this?

Thanx

 

It is the process of telling search engines that you have updated your website content and using this ping process is easy and fast. Pingler dot com, pingoat dot com are few examples of ping websites.

 

Thanks for sharing.

 

Thanks for explaining cheers

 

Just as techendeavour describes, I use http://pingomatic.com/ which is a good free, PR7 pinging site

 

It took me forever to figure it out.

 

I just started pinging, but haven't noticed any change

 

well, you will know more by checking the below website:

 

To ping or to let search engine portals aware that there is something new in your site that need be indexed and crawled.

 

I think the "DigitalChameleon" has given the specific & correct answer. Why don't search for that small thing in Google?

 

Ping is a term which means that we forciblly tell the SE to come crawling our site after we have made some changes or updated the content. It is really useful as then the old content will be removed fromt the Search Engines content index.

 

ping means to communicate one terminal with another..

 

I visualize pinging when I send a message to someone via IM and is like me reaching through the computer and thumping them in the face.... *ping*