Slashdot Mirror
Bots Now Account For 61% of Net Traffic
codeusirae writes "A study by Incapsula suggests 61.5% of all website traffic is now generated by bots. The security firm said that was a 21% rise on last year's figure of 51%. From the article: 'Some of these automated software tools are malicious - stealing data or posting ads for scams in comment sections. But the firm said the biggest growth in traffic was for 'good' bots. These are tools used by search engines to crawl websites in order to index their content, by analytics companies to provide feedback about how a site is performing, and by others to carry out other specific tasks - such as helping the Internet Archive preserve content before it is deleted.'"
Story is about website traffic, not network bytecount.
The article states that traffic "hitting a website" is generated more by bots than by actual "humans in chairs". Not that the Internet traffic is 61% bots. Geesh slashdot...
To control the scraping frequency of a well-behaved bot, a webmaster can use HTTP headers such as Last-modified and Expires as well as robots.txt directives such as Crawl-delay.
Well, there was that Google bot that watched you tube to teach a computer how to recognize cats, so... it's not impossibly far fetched.
http://www.npr.org/2012/06/26/155792609/a-massive-google-network-learns-to-identify
---Chip
I didn't know there was such a thing...
Youtube is a website. Netflix is a website.
Most trades in the stock market are from bots as well.