| A bot is common parlance on the Internet for a software program that is a software agent.
A bot interacts with other network services intended for people as if
it were a person. One typical use of bots is to gather information. The
term is derived from the word "robot," reflecting the autonomous character in the "virtual robot"-ness of the concept.
The most common bots are those that covertly install themselves on
people's computers for malicious purposes, and that have been described
as remote attack tools. More generally they are web software agents that interface with web pages. Web crawlers or spiders are web robots that recursively gather web-page information, as does the bot used by Google ("GoogleBot"). They may also be used to interact dynamically with a site in a particular way, as by exploiting or locating arbitrage opportunities for financial gain.
Some bots communicate with other users of Internet-based services, via instant messenger (IM), for example, or via Internet Relay Chat (IRC) or another web interface. These chatterbots
may allow people to ask questions in plain English and then formulate a
proper response. These bots can often handle many tasks, including
reporting weather, zip-code information, sports scores, converting
currency or other units, etc. Others are used for entertainment, such
as SmarterChild AOL Instant Messenger and Jabberwacky on Yahoo! Messenger.
An additional role of IRC bots
may be to lurk in the background of a conversation channel, commenting
on certain phrases uttered by the participants (based on pattern matching). This is sometimes used as a help service for new users, or even for mild censorship (e.g., profanity).
There has been a great deal of controversy about the use of bots in an automated trading function. 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 attentions of further bots. The UK-based bet exchange Betfair
saw such a large amount of traffic coming from bots they launched a
WebService API aimed at bot programmers through which Betfair can
actively manage bot interactions.
Another more malicious use for bots is the coordination and operation of an automated attack on networked computers, such as a distributed denial-of-service attack.
Internet bots can also be used to commit click fraud and more recently have seen usage around MMORPG games.
--from Wikipedia.org
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