What is Bots?

A bot is common parlance on the Internet for a software program that is a software agent. A Bot interacts with other network services intended for people as if it were a real person. One typical use of bots is to gather information. The term is derived from the word "robot," reflecting the autonomous character in the "virtual robot"-ness of the concept.

The most common bots are those that covertly install themselves on people's computers for malicious purposes, and that have been described as remote attack tools. More generally they are web software agents that interface with web pages. Web crawlers or spiders are web robots that recursively gather web-page information, as does the bot used by Google ("GoogleBot"). They may also be used to interact dynamically with a site in a particular way, as by exploiting or locating arbitrage opportunities for financial gain.

Some bots communicate with other users of Internet-based services, via instant messenger (IM), for example, or via Internet Relay Chat (IRC) or another web interface. These chatterbots may allow people to ask questions in plain English and then formulate a proper response. These bots can often handle many tasks, including reporting weather, zip-code information, sports scores, converting currency or other units, etc. Others are used for entertainment, such as SmarterChild AOL Instant Messenger and Jabberwacky on Yahoo! Messenger.

An additional role of IRC bots may be to lurk in the background of a conversation channel, commenting on certain phrases uttered by the participants (based on pattern matching). This is sometimes used as a help service for new users, or even for mild censorship (e.g., profanity).

There has been a great deal of controversy about the use of bots in an automated trading function. eBay has been to court in an attempt to suppress a third-party company from using bots to traverse their site looking for bargains; this approach backfired on eBay and attracted the attentions of further bots. The UK-based bet exchange Betfair saw such a large amount of traffic coming from bots they launched a WebService API aimed at bot programmers through which Betfair can actively manage bot interactions.

Another more malicious use for bots is the coordination and operation of an automated attack on networked computers, such as a distributed denial-of-service attack.

Internet bots can also be used to commit click fraud and more recently have seen usage around MMORPG games.

simply explanation, i think that bot is just like robot, it can help you do anything, but the advanced condition is that you must set some order for it before you run your bot, maybe you will say you do not know computer code, do not worry, there are some bot that is not needed the user do some code, wish this is helpful to you, of course, you still can give me your opinion, it is totally from my personal opinion.