Chapter 9. Web Robots

We continue our tour of HTTP architecture with a close look at the self-animating user agents called web robots.

Web robots are software programs that automate a series of web transactions without human interaction. Many robots wander from web site to web site, fetching content, following hyperlinks, and processing the data they find. These kinds of robots are given colorful names such as "crawlers," "spiders," "worms," and "bots" because of the way they automatically explore web sites, seemingly with minds of their own.

Here are a few examples of web robots:

Stock-graphing robots issue HTTP GETs to stock market servers every few minutes and use the data to build stock price trend graphs.

Web-census robots gather "census" information about the scale and evolution of the World Wide Web. They wander the Web counting the number of pages and recording the size, language, and media type of each page.^[1]

^[1] http://www.netcraft.comcollects great census metrics on what flavors of servers are being used by sites around the Web.

Search-engine robots collect all the documents they find to create search databases.

Comparison-shopping robots gather web pages from online store catalogs to build databases of products and their prices.