What are robots doing looking at the forums?

[Daveyzombie]

So I was looking through who is active at the moment on the forum and came across this:

Robot: Google AdSense

I was curious what a robot could be doing looking into "Best Physics book"--I think that was the post it was "looking" at.

Anyone have any ideas? haha

 

[fresh_42]

On third position out of 700,000 results:

 

[Daveyzombie]

hmmm so they're just programs generating searches. I see haha

 

[Borek]

AdSense robot is not collecting data for search results, but checking the page content to choose relevant ads that are displayed on the page.

 

[jtbell]

Right now I see robots from Google, Bing, Yahoo, Baidu and Yandex, all of which are search engines.

I also see one from Proximic, which appears to be similar to Adsense, but for a different company.

And there's Majestic-12, which collects and sells data about links etc. to website operators, for search engine optimization.

I didn't go through the whole list, so there are probably other individual bots, but those cover the major categories, I think.

 

[Vanadium 50]

What are robots doing looking at the forums?

Preparing for the upcoming Robot Apocalypse.

 

[Ibix]

Preparing for the upcoming Robot Apocalypse.

Presumably they don't post because "Can u help me kill all humanz please?!??" got them banned under the dangerous activities rules.

 

[OCR]

Preparing for the upcoming Robot Apocalypse.

Hah ! ...Let em' come... I've got one of my own...

Maybe a bunch more, too... but I ain't sayin' ! .. ..

​

 

[jtbell]

there are probably other individual bots

Of course, the black-helicopter bots (NSA, CIA, M12, KGB, UNCLE, SMERSH, KAOS et al.) don't identify themselves.

 

[rootone]

They used to be called web crawlers originally, which seems an apt enough description of what they do.
I don't know why this changed to 'robots', but I think it's less descriptive, and invokes images of humanoid machines with highly advanced AI.
In fact they are just software routines running on servers and are not even vaguely intelligent, they just look at web pages and return information about the content.

 

[krater]

They used to be called web crawlers originally[...]I don't know why this changed to 'robots'[...]
In fact they are just software routines running on servers and are not even vaguely intelligent...

One can broadly describe robots as entities, bolts bits or otherwise, that respond to environments autonomously based on programmed rules or scripts. When one mentions robots in a factory context for example it can certainly imply vast complexity of sensing and control, however AI advanced or otherwise need not enter the picture outside of futuristic fiction plots.

Perhaps it's for the better that we dropped the relatively innocuous label "web crawler" and replaced it with "robot" as it reminds us of the more abstract and potentially threatening nature of these particular whirls of code.

 

[Drakkith]

Perhaps it's for the better that we dropped the relatively innocuous label "web crawler" and replaced it with "robot" as it reminds us of the more abstract and potentially threatening nature of these particular whirls of code.

I say we go all the way and call them "meatsack destroyers". This is no time for half-measures!

 

[krater]

I say we go all the way and call them "meatsack destroyers". This is no time for half-measures!

Sounds ok to me. When should we all change the filename on web servers to meatsack-destroyers.txt?

 

[Borek]

Sounds ok to me. When should we all change the filename on web servers to meatsack-destroyers.txt?

Even without changes to the robot exclusion standard it should be doable with a HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently.