Everyone has heard about bots today, but we’ve heard the term in so many different contexts. Some people heard of bots in video games, others talked to chatbots, and some heard about them in movies. However, none of these is as important as internet bots.
What Are Bots And How They Work?
In most cases, people think that bots are the same as AI, but they aren’t. However, some bots might use artificial intelligence technology. So let’s dig a little deeper and see what bots are and how they are used.
What are internet bots?
Bots or internet bots are software programs designed to perform a variety of automated tasks online. In most cases, they are designed to deal with simpler tasks that have a repetitive nature and are done in high volume.
These programs and scripts let users do these tasks accurately and quickly on a much larger scale. A typical example is the Google crawler bot that works non-stop on collecting information about millions of websites and their domains so that it can index them.
These internet robots perform lots of tasks daily and make people’s jobs easier. They save time and let people focus on their core assignments. Now let’s see how these bots actually work.
How they work
Bots are software programs that have a complex system of algorithms and scripts. However, they also include a conversational interface. Simply put, this means that they are simple to use and usually don’t require programming knowledge.
Their interface is designed to give simplicity. It’s about bringing tech solutions closer to “normal” users that don’t have programming knowledge. These tools don’t require any direct operation from humans. Once they are set up and assigned the tasks they should complete, they can do everything independently.
That’s how chatbots talk alone with people, and some of them are designed to send out notifications to humans only in certain situations. On the other hand, they can be assigned to gather relevant information on the web.
Are all bots bad?
Lots of people associate bots with something negative because there are harmful bots out there. However, the good thing about it is that there are also useful bots that people use for various tasks. After all, bots are programs, and programs can be designed to do malicious things.
There are a lot of bots on the internet. They account for about half of the online activity. Sadly, around 60% of them are used for bad intentions, creating issues for businesses, individuals, and their online presence.
Bots help run the internet, but some of them are designed to cause problems for internet users. When someone gets attacked or scammed in some way online, there’s a good chance that a bot did this.
Harmful bots and their uses
Bad bots are used for malicious purposes by hackers and scammers. Some of the most common types are:
- Spambots
Spambots gather email addresses from social media, businesses, and websites. After getting lots of email addresses, these bots send out thousands of emails to those addresses. However, that’s not all – they often include ads, malware, and scamming forms to steal personal information.
- DDoS bots
DDoS attacks disrupt a server to make its service unavailable. It’s done by sending out thousands of requests to a server with a group of bots, also known as a botnet. They generate enormous traffic that disrupts all functionalities. That’s why website operators need to learn how to detect bot traffic and block it out to prevent downtime.
- Brute force bots
Sites and services that require login credentials are often focused on by groups of bots trying to gain access. Each of the bots tries out hundreds of different combinations.
Beneficial bots and their uses
- Social media bots
Social media platforms make these bots deliver relevant recommendations, ads, protect users, and remove spam content. Overall they are used to give a better user experience to social media users.
- Scraping bots
Scraping bots are designed to search through a large number of websites and their publicly available data. They are used to gather data relevant to businesses, including reviews, brand mentions, pricing information, and so much more.
- Search engine bots
The most popular search engine bot is Googlebot. This bot crawls the web for new pages, websites, and domains. It indexes pages and helps give Google relevant information about site optimization and their future SEO rankings.
Conclusion | What Are Bots And How They Work?
Overall, bots are really useful. You can use them to your business advantage, improve various processes, and get relevant data for marketing, market research, customer experience, and so on.
However, it’s also important to protect your business website from the attacks of malicious bots. Learn how to detect bot traffic to protect your assets and recognize real users on your site.