Definition: bot

(1) (roBOT) See robot, chatbot, botnet, botcloud and crypto bot.

(2) (roBOT) A search engine program that indexes the Web. See spider.

(3) (roBOT) A program that performs a repetitive function 24/7 or waits in the background to be triggered by some event (time of day, receipt of data, etc.). The term bot is used for myriad "intelligent agents" on the Web, and it is estimated that a third of traffic over the Internet comes from bots and not humans. A bot can be programmed to do almost anything from posting a message to starting up or closing down other software processes.

Bots are often used to find information. For example, a "spider" is a search engine bot that "crawls" the Web 24/7 collecting the content on Web pages (see scraping).

A bot can also run in a user's machine or in a server in a private network. See social bot, scalper bot, trader bot, spambot, chatbot, agent, CAPTCHA and trolling.

(4) (BOT) (Beginning Of Tape) The status of a magnetic tape file when it is first mounted in the drive. See BOF.

(5) (BOT) (Bulk-Only Transport) An early USB protocol for external storage drives. See UASP.