The Internet is awash with bots. According to a recent report, over half of the Web traffic is made up of bots. But if you thought bots were a new phenomena, you have a 2nd thought coming. They have been around almost as long as the Internet has. But what on earth is a bot & why the sudden interest in ’em now?
Just what are bots?
To put it simply, a bot is a software application that runs automated tasks on the Internet. For example, it might be a bot(software) & not a human being conversing with you while you ask questions Online to a supposed customer care “executive”. Bots or, in this case, chatbots, are used to emulate human activity in a seemingly simple question & answer exchange Online – 1 of the many uses.
Thus, 1 of the original uses of bots was for moderating Internet chats.
More specifically, a bot comes handy to perform simple, repetitive tasks that would otherwise be time-consuming, mundane or tedious for a human to perform. Hence, they are also known as WWW robots.
Another easy example of a bot is a search engine. A search engine spider bot will troll the Web & index new pages. Its automated scripting fetches, analyzes & collates information from the Web.
Yet another common example is of gaming bots, whereby a player achieves a significant advantage by implementing some repetitive routine with the use of a bot rather than manually, which slows down the gaming experience.
Good, Bad & Gray bots
Even as bots can be used to automate a repetitive Online interaction, their ability to mimic human conversation, undetected, can be used as a tool of manipulation. While the good use of bots include search engines using them to index Web pages, or the delivery of media & ‘live’ streaming for different types of browsers, hackers may use bots to perform malicious acts on the Internet like breaching the security of PCs through the installation of malicious files.
Bots have also been used to artificially alter, disrupt or mute Online conversations. Others are those bots that send you annoying spam messages. Shudder.
And then there are the gray bots. For example, several shopping Websites use bots to promote deals where the search engine like spider will index information about products on the Web & the best prices. Some e-commerce sites take steps to ban shopping bots of this type, while their creators feel that they are simply providing a better service to their own users.
Bot categories
There are bots that are really helpful.
They include:
Spider Bots: Used by search engines to explore Web pages for Content, its organization & linking, these bots troll (in a good way) the Internet & use certain criteria to index & determine the ranking of Web pages within the search results.
Trading Bots: These are used by spider bots & also by Online auction or shopping Sites to locate the best deals on a specific product or service. In this case, a trading bot is used for commercial gain.
Media Bots: Media bots are used to provide updates on weather conditions, news & sports, currency exchange, & are used as censors in applications that run chat rooms & instant messenger programs.
RSS Bots: These keep you up-to-date on latest feeds/news by browsing through & pulling information from hundreds of RSS feeds.
Chatbots or Chatterbots: These help conduct a human-like conversation via auditory or textual methods. They are also used in dialog systems for various practical purposes including customer service or information acquisition.
Where there is good, there is always a bad, folks. So we have some bad bots too. Types of malicious bots used in a variety of ways to perform malicious acts & network security breaches.
They include:
Spam Bots: This type of bot crawl the Net for the purpose of collecting data from forms that have been filled out Online, spreading advertisements & pop-ups throughout the Internet, & collecting email addresses for the purpose of spamming.
Hacker Bots: Hackers use this type of bot to crawl around the Internet & find vulnerabilities in Websites & Online applications so they can exploit them for malicious purposes.
Botnets: Botnets are networks that hackers set up online by using “zombie” computers to perform malicious acts such as denial of service attacks. Zombie computers are machines that have been taken over by the hacker without the knowledge of the PC owner.
Download Bots: These are bots that are used to forcibly download a Web page that the hacker wants the surfer to see instead of a Web page that the surfer requested.
Malaware / Virus Bots: These bots infect & turn your computer into a zombie, adding it into a network with other infected computers. Hackers then can use the network to perform their misdeeds.
Click Bots: These can eat up your Pay Per Click funds or trick you into following them by showing up in your Analytics
So, the million dollar question – why the sudden interest now?
That’s largely due to 2 reasons – chat bots & Internet biggies like Facebook getting into them. Some say that bots are about to herald in a new era of the Internet. Earlier in the week, for example, Facebook launched ‘Bots for Messenger’, a step that many say, could define the next decade in the same way that the Apple App Store launch paved the path for companies like Uber to build a business off your phone. Its new messaging platform will help businesses build intelligent chatbots to let the
m communicate in Messenger.
Simply put, chat bots could change the way humans have conversations on the Net or in the digital world.
(Sources: Spamlaws.com, Wikipedia & Business Insider)
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