Re: robot defined

Kim Davies (kim@staff.iinet.net.au)
Sat, 23 Nov 1996 06:51:11 +0800


Quoting HipCrime:
|
| Here's a definition that's OK by me. Since ActiveAgent
| is controlled by a human (the documentation uses the word
| "driven"), it should never access the ROBOTS.TXT file and
| will never need to obey the robots-exclusion "standard".

If I'm not mistaken ActiveAgent is given a URL and treks off
from there through HREF's. That's my definition of a robot.

Web spiders do have some amount of human control. They
too are given a set of URLs to start with by humans,
by your logic are they not robots too?

Here are a couple of definitions that might be applicable:

A robot is any software that traverses hyperlinks in
a document without a specific corresponding action by a human
operator to do so.

A robot is any software which obtains objects beyond a page
specified by a human operator and it's respective embedded objects.

kim

--
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  url = http://www.iinet.net.au/~kim
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