What the hell is a Bot?

I've been on several forums and am generally savvy to their inner workings, but one thing I don't know is:

What the hell is a bot? At the bottom of the main page it lists who is currently logged in as well as who has been online in the last 24 hours. Every once in a while it says there is a "Bot" visiting, usually Yahoo, MSN or google.

I'm assuming it has something to do with the search engine, but not sure exactly.

Have you seen the movie "Transformers"? I think it's the robots. They're learning about us through the world wide web.

I blame Al Gore.


I think that it actually is related to the search engines.

There are many types of bots (short for robots). Spambots will harvest emails for spam mail, or some are sophisticated enough to join a community and dump some annoying crap like links to other sites that are just crappy merchant sites or, worse leave virii and worms in your funbox (ladies beware! ).

Poker bots are programs that play on poker sites, usually badly.

The bots you see like "yahoo" or "google" crawl the web and collect content that way when you do a search the search engine is aware that there is information at that location that is relative to your search. Does that make sense?

PoWdA wrote:The bots you see like "yahoo" or "google" crawl the web and collect content that way when you do a search the search engine is aware that there is information at that location that is relative to your search. Does that make sense?

But what is the VPIP of the google crawl bot?

Mondogarage wrote:

PoWdA wrote:The bots you see like "yahoo" or "google" crawl the web and collect content that way when you do a search the search engine is aware that there is information at that location that is relative to your search. Does that make sense?

But what is the VPIP of the google crawl bot?

not good, but yahoos is way way worse.