The origin of the bot is robot. A bot is a software program that can execute commands or perform routine tasks, and one of its most common uses is to answer messages or carry out searches, either automatically or with minimal human intervention. This means that bots can run according to their instructions without a human user needing to manually start them up every time, often imitating or replacing a human user’s behaviour. Typically, they are used to perform repetitive tasks much faster than human users can.
According to Cloudflare, a major player in a Content Delivery Network (CDN), more than half of internet traffic involves bots scanning content, interacting with webpages, chatting with users, or looking for attack targets. Some bots are useful, such as search engine bots that index content for search or customer service bots that help users. Other bots are used in less positive ways, such as bots programmed to break into user accounts, scan the web for contact information for sending spam, or perform other malicious activities. But whether used for good or bad, there are several types of bots with unique goals and tasks. One of the best known is chatbots. But social bots are also very much used; these bots are considered, in a way, opinion bots, because they are developed to influence discussions with users on social media platforms. Spiders or crawlers, also known as web crawlers, are bots that access websites and gather content for indexes in search engines, such as Google and others. Similarly, web scraping crawlers are used for data harvesting and extracting relevant content from webpages. These are less known and less visible bots, but they are of great importance for the functioning of the internet as we know it.
