> Hi Erik ...
>
> Surely you must realize the importance of definitions.
Absolutely. The key is making sure that you don't let folks weasel out
of supporting standards by having an overly strict or vague
definition.
> When we can't agree on what a "robot" is, how can we agree
> on what it should do, how it should behave, etc?
I suspect we can agree on forms of behavior. There may be gobs of
robots / agents out there, but how many of them are doing
fundamentally different things? You got your indexers, you got your
proxies, you got your page watchers. A couple others, But overall,
most exhibit the same kind of behavior, which I think can be
categorized (in an agreed upon standard!).
> It's still unclear to me what the difference is, between
> a person manually browsing pages, and a person manually
> instructing their "agent" to browse those same pages.
>
> When the "agent" is based on a server, then (and in my
> opinion, ONLY then), can one seriously believe that the
> program can rapid-fire requests to another server.
>
How's this:
New PowerBrowser 2000. Will pre-fetch in parallel all references one
and two links removed from the page you're browsing while you read
it. A must have for any corporate heavy browser.
Run it from your corporate net with T1 or higher connectivity. Point
it at Yahoo. See how quickly Filo and folks come hollering. It really
doesn't take much to rapid-fire a site, and you don't have to be
coming from big servers with big wires.
-Erik
-- Erik Selberg "I get by with a little help selberg@cs.washington.edu from my friends." http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/selberg _________________________________________________ This messages was sent by the robots mailing list. To unsubscribe, send mail to robots-request@webcrawler.com with the word "unsubscribe" in the body. For more info see http://info.webcrawler.com/mak/projects/robots/robots.html