Bots

Freeley · Dec 31, 2012

In short what are they and what do they do?
I was just looking at the current users online and noticed there are 3 bots online at the moment (bing, google adsense and msnmedia)
I often hear about bots but have no idea what they are - could somebody enlighten me please?

calikev · Dec 31, 2012

Hi bots are very useful and clever the spend all day looking for words and phrases
They search different websites and store information so when you type a word into google
It will look in its database and direct you to a certain place. Ie if you type in vw California fridge
Into google it will bring up this forum on the search page if you get what I mean :thumb

the google add bot is also clever it has a data base of adverts so when people are browsing the forum it will know what you are reading and place adds at the side related to what you are interested in
Hope this helps in some way :thumb

Californiaman · Dec 31, 2012

They're generally automated gatherers of information. In the case of google, they 'read' all of the posts and attempt to index them before adding the data to their search engine.

Other bots may attempt to collect phone numbers, email addresses to add them to spammers databases etc.

Their are standards built in to the HTML language (which is what most of the information on the Internet is published in) which governs what a bot can and can' t read (you can effectively make pages invisible to them) but that assumes the owner of the bot is following best practice guidelines.

Where you hear of a 'bot net' that is a nasty form where a number of machines may be infected which allows someone to control them for their own purposes.