Bots are software programs that perform automated, repetitive, pre-defined tasks. These tasks can include almost any interaction with software that has an API.These tasks can range from making dinner reservations, to getting an update on a support request, to checking competitors’ prices on their websites.
Organizations or individuals who use bots can also use bot management software, which helps manage bots and protect against malicious bots. Bot managers may also be included as part of a web app security platform. A bot manager can allow the use of some bots and block the use of others that might cause harm to a system. To do this, a bot manager classifies any incoming requests by humans and good bots, as well as known malicious and unknown bots. Any suspect bot traffic is then directed away from a site by the bot manager. Some basic bot management feature sets include IP rate limiting and CAPTCHAs. IP rate limiting restricts the number of same address requests, while CAPTCHAs provide challenges that help differentiate bots from humans.
Bots are made from sets of algorithms that aid them in their designated tasks. These tasks include conversing with a human — which attempts to mimic human behaviours — or gathering content from other websites. There are several different types of bots designed to accomplish a wide variety of tasks. A few use cases/ types are:
Spider Bots: Spiders bots or crawlers, browse the web by following hyperlinks, with the objective of retrieving and indexing website content. Spiders download HTML and other resources, such as CSS, JavaScript, and images, and use them to process site content.
Scraper Bots: Scrapers are bots that read data from websites with the objective of saving them offline and enabling their reuse. This may take the form of scraping the entire content of web pages or scraping web content to obtain specific data points, such as names and prices of products on eCommerce sites.
Social bots:Social bots simulate human users on social networks Many users are misled, since they see believable information on a profile and assume that they are conversing with people. They converse with other user, build a narrative and influence opinions just like human operators would
Chatbot :In contrast to web crawlers, chat bots are reactive i.e. they react to human activities and specialize in responding to other chat participants in a meaningful way. In everyday life, chat bots are primarily encountered as digital assistants.
There are different types of bots which differ greatly when it comes to their technical complexity. The spectrum ranges from simple algorithms to highly complex AI technology capable of learning from past data and adapt to the current environment.