Internet bots

Internet bots are software applications that run automated tasks applied to any content publicly available on the Internet. Usually they perform tasks that are repetitive and trivial at a much higher speed than any human being can do. We will outline the most common uses here.

Search engine content indexing

This is a task performed by all major search engines. Their bots scan the web all the time reading publicly available content and indexing it for searching purposes. This basically applies to any textual content although multimedia files can also be indexed by their name and description.

Harvesting email addresses

These bots analyze public content of web sites and extract any email addresses, thus generating a mailing list of potential recipients. To understand why somebody would need a list of email addresses we need to understand the concept of spam. Any form of unsolicited message received through some electronic service is considered spam. These messages usually contain...