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Internet bots, also known as web robots, WWW robots or simply bots, are software applications that run automated tasks over the Internet. Typically, bots perform tasks that are both simple and structurally repetitive, at a much higher rate than would be possible for a human alone. The largest use of bots is in web spidering, in which an automated script fetches, analyzes and files information from web servers at many times the speed of a human. Each server can have a file called robots.txt, containing rules for the spidering of that server that the bot is supposed to obey.

In addition to their uses outlined above, bots may also be implemented where a response speed faster than that of humans is required (e.g., gaming bots and auction-site robots) or less commonly in situations where the emulation of human activity is required, for example chat bots. Recently bots have been used for search advertising, such as Google Adsense.^[1]

Commercial purposes[link]

Example of an automated online assistant, where chatterbots are major components.

Chatterbots are used in automated online assistants by organizations as a way of interacting with consumers and users of services. This can avail for enterprises to reduce their operating and training cost.^[2] A major underlying technology to such systems is natural language processing.^[2]

There has been a great deal of controversy about the use of bots in an automated trading function. Auction website eBay has been to court in an attempt to suppress a third-party company from using bots to traverse their site looking for bargains; this approach backfired on eBay and attracted the attention of further bots.^{[citation needed]}

Charitable purposes[link]

Bots have also been known to fast-track the purposes of charities, one of which is FreeRice.

On FreeRice[link]

Since FreeRice became well-known through Digg.com and other news sources,^[3] many programming-adept users created scripts to automatically play the game for them. The scripts operate far faster than humans alone and run for 24 hours a day. At first, the scripts got only ≈1/4 of the words correct by random chance. Eventually, these bots were adapted with automated online dictionary search, dictionary files, and word database dumps so the programs can choose the correct answers the first time more often. The word database dumps were created so when the incorrect answer was chosen, the bots would record the correct answer the next page would show. Thus, the bot would choose the correct answer whenever it happened upon the same words later. Due to the growing number of scripts used on FreeRice, the number of rice donated has remarkably risen. Currently there are no rules governing "ricebots", as they are called. Until those rules are formed, anyone is free to program and use the scripts. With a delay of about 3 seconds between iterations, it is estimated that a script can feed about 8 people per day, if running 24/7.^[4] The idea was taken even further to create a multi-threaded bot which can run fifty or more browser instances at a time, enough to liberate as much as 600,000 grains of rice per hour or to feed 720 people per day.^[5] One script with 1,000 threads was able to donate over 3,000,000 grains in just a few hours.

Donated rice comes from the advertisements from sponsors, therefore abuse of scripts will likely lead to catastrophe, as advertisers prefer that actual people view their advertisements. Knowing the existence of the bots, FreeRice updated their FAQ explaining the potential damage of botting.^[6] Some bots have made changes to make sure they won't spoil the FreeRice spirit.^[7]

Malicious purposes[link]

Another, more malicious use of bots is the coordination and operation of an automated attack on networked computers, such as a denial-of-service attack by a botnet. Internet bots can also be used to commit click fraud and more recently have seen usage around MMORPG games as computer game bots. A spambot is an internet bot that attempts to spam large amounts of content on the Internet, usually adding advertising links.

• There are malicious bots (and botnets) of the following types:

1. Spambots that harvest email addresses from internet forums, contact forms or guestbook pages
2. Viruses and worms
3. DDoS attacks
4. Botnets / zombie computers; etc.
5. File-name modifiers on peer-to-peer file-sharing networks. These change the names of files (often containing malware) to match user search queries.
6. Automating the entry of internet sweepstakes or instant win games to get an advantage
7. Automating tasks on promotional web sites to win prizes
8. Votebots which automatically cast votes for or against certain forms of user-contributed content such as videos on Youtube or reader comments on blog pages.

• Bots are also used to buy up good seats for concerts, particularly by ticket brokers who resell the tickets. Bots are employed against entertainment event-ticketing sites, like TicketMaster.com. The bots are used by ticket brokers to unfairly obtain the best seats for themselves while depriving the general public from also having a chance to obtain the good seats. The bot runs through the purchase process and obtains better seats by pulling as many seats back as it can.
• Bots are often used in massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG) to farm for resources that would otherwise take significant time or effort to obtain; this is a concern for most online in-game economies. As such, players are often banned from their respective MMORPG for going outside the programming and "cheating" as bots are not typically allowed because they give an unfair advantage.
• Some automated programs that can fall under the definition of bots are used to automatically scrape websites. These can be considered malicious in cases where the scraped content is republished elsewhere without the consent of the website owner, and when they are set to scrape quickly leading to usage of large amounts of bandwidth.

The most widely used anti-bot technique is the use of CAPTCHA, which is designed to distinguish between a human user and a less-sophisticated bot by means of a character recognition task that, ideally, only humans can perform successfully.

Bots in popular culture[link]

• The 2006 Basshunter hit song "Boten Anna" is about a man who mistakes a female IRC user named Anna for an IRC bot.
• During the naming contest for a Hungarian bridge, Colbert Nation forum members developed a bot to stuff the ballot box. Stephen Colbert asked his viewers to cease their voting to name the bridge after him, and apologized to the Hungarians with a large segment on his show, The Colbert Report.

See also[link]

• Botnet
• Chatterbot
• Interactive online characters
• IRC bot
• Knowbot
• Spambot
• Web crawler

References[link]

External links[link]