>1.1) What is a ROBOT?
>
> A Robot is a program that traverses the World Wide Web, gathering some
>sort of information from each site it visits. This journey is accomplished
>by visiting a web page and then visiting some or all of its linked pages.
>The method one follows whether it's recursive or some sort of fuzzy logic
>determines the effectivness of the search.
We have a robot which does 'fuzzy' searching, for which your description
is appropriate. But in general, the document collection process (= robot)
and the search process executed in response to a user query (on the resulting
collection) are completely separate. Besides, searching the contents of
document collections is not the only purpose of robots; robots can be used
to check the validity of hyperlinks, for example. Your description is
accurate, as applied to the robot process itself, but it may be confusing.
A minor quibble: robots must use some heuristics in determining which links
to follow. All robots are 'recursive', and most of them cut off the process
in a more or less arbitrary way, which could be called 'fuzzy'. There is no
or/or decision here.
-- Reinier Post reinpost@win.tue.nl a.k.a. <A HREF="http://www.win.tue.nl/win/cs/is/reinpost/">me</A> [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK]