RenoGeek's Computer Terms Glossary - Bot

A "Bot" or "Bot's" are automated software programs that execute commands when it receives input.

Bots are seen most often in internet related areas like that of online chat rooms and web searching "spiders". The chat room bots do things such as greet people when they enter a chat room or kick abusive people out of chat rooms.

Web searching Bots, "spiders" or sometimes called "crawlers", search the internet and retrieve documents, then record the information and links found on the pages it "indexed". They then produce electronic catalogs of the sites that have been "spidered." These catalogs make up the index of sites that are used for search engine results, like those seen on Google or Yahoo!.

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