Whenever we come across the term 'Robot', the very first thing that strikes our mind is the hardware robots. The robots that are programmed in such a way that they can replace a human being in doing various tasks at a specified time. But what are robots on websites?
Web robots are a set of programs or software application that traverse all through the website and perform various automated tasks. Despite the fact that these robots can perform different errands over a Web application, they are broadly used to perform tedious assignments. Web robots are also known as Web spiders or Web crawlers. These robots help to recover data from various Web servers, analyse and then record them at a speed faster than human speed if they perform the work. A portion of the Web bots helps in reviving your Facebook newsfeeds constantly while a few, as Google bots, enable us in figuring out how to rank diverse search results from Google. Web bots influence utilization of contents to communicate with various Web applications. For this reason, web robots can be developed using the open source scripting languages like Perl, Python, C, PHP and so on. With the help of these languages, Web bot developers compose scripts that can perform diverse procedural assignments, for example, Web scanning, Web indexing, and so forth. Web bots can be made to perform numerous other distinctive sorts of errands with the help of these scripts and, thus, they are classified according to the actions performed by them on any Web application. Not only this, there are some pernicious Web robots which are used by the hackers to perform several tasks on the internet. Lurking in the background of instant messaging, Internet Relay Chat or other Web interfaces, Web robots communicate with the other users of Internet-based services.
It has been discussed earlier that web bots are categorized based on their tasks. Based on this they can be of two types. Legitimate robots and Malicious robots
Legitimate robots are those web bots that are required to perform legitimate tasks. They mainly perform the repetitive tasks, thus saving time for the manual work. According to these works, they are further classified. What are they?
Spider Web Robots
These robots are utilized by various search engines to investigate distinctive Web pages for association, content and linking. Based on the concept of indexing, they decide the positioning or ranking of various Web pages within the search results. Such kinds of Web robots are utilized by Google and are called Googlebots.
Trading Web Robots
These robots go through various online auction sites and analyse best deals on every product or service. Thus it can be considered that these web bots are mainly used for the commercial gains. For an example, Trivago, an online hotel booking Web application, uses such bots to display the best hotel deals.
Media Web Robots
These robots provide the latest news updates, weather conditions, sports news, currency exchange rates, etc. They are likewise utilized as censors in various applications that run instant messenger projects. Such Web bots are broadly utilized by various online messenger applications like eBuddy, IMO, and so forth.
Malicious robots are those robots that are used by the hackers used to perform malicious tasks. They can also be classified in the following ways.
Spam Web Robots
These gather distinctive information from different online forms. Likewise, they are utilized for spreading promotions with the assistance of pop-ups. Distinctive commercial firms additionally utilize them for gathering email address of individuals to spam them with ads.
Hacker Web Robots
These robots are used by the hackers to creep around the Internet and in this way they discover the vulnerabilities in various websites and online applications with the goal that they can be oppressed by performing malicious tasks.
Botnets
These are really the systems that different hackers set up online by utilizing zombie PCs keeping in mind the end goal to perform different malignant acts, for example, denial of service attacks.
Download Web Robots
We very often encounter a situation in which we are left with no other alternative than to click a link so that the specific Web page gets downloaded. These robots are utilized to persuasively download a particular Web page that the hacker needs the web surfer to see rather than the one that the page he has requested.
It is not very surprising that greater part of all the web activity is really empowered by Web robots. Most of the visitors to the websites are not humans, but Web bots. This is the reason why some website pages need to verify that the user is a human and not a robot.
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