Bot

A bot is an automated software program that can execute certain commands when it receives a specific input. (Kind of like a ro-bot, get it?) Bots are most often seen at work in the Internet-related areas of online chat (IRC) and web searching. The online chat bots are usually a nuisance. They will do things like greet people when they enter a chat room, advertise web sites, or kick people out of chat rooms with an accompanying nasty message. The web searching bots, also known as spiders and crawlers, search the Web and retrieve millions of HTML documents, then record the information and links found on the pages. They then generate catalogs of the sites they have searched which can later be accessed by a search engine.