ShareThisBots get a lot of bad press. You hear all the time about bots secretly installed on computers by malware to send spam, steal passwords or attack and bring down Web sites.
But you don't hear much about good bots.
TechMan, being sworn to uphold truth, justice and the American way (wait, that's Superman) feels he needs to right this injustice.
First a little etymology. Bot, obviously, comes from the word robot and robot comes from Czechoslovakia. In 1921, the Czech writer Karel Capek's play called "R.U.R." (Rossum's Universal Robots) debuted. Capek credited his brother Josef with suggesting the word. The word robota means drudgery or serf labor in many Slavic languages.
So robots started off with bad press, too. In fact, popular culture has given us many evil robots: Mechagodzilla, the Terminator T1000 and the Cylons for example.
But there also were good such robots as R. Daneel Olivaw in Isaac Asimov's sci-fi stories that posited the Three Laws of Robotics (which any old geek worth his salt can quote). Asimov coined the term "robotics" in one of those stories. And what about the no-name robot in "Lost in Space" (which actually said "Danger, Will Robinson" only once on the show) or C3PO (annoyingly prissy but good at heart)?
Just as there are good robots, there are good bots. In fact, a lot of the everyday things we do with computers, especially on the Web, would not be possible without bots.
A bot is a piece of software that can do repeated tasks many times faster than a human, usually over the Internet.
The most common good bots are used by search engines to find information about Web sites and enter it into a database. Sometimes called spiders, without them there would be no search engines because humans could not possibly find and classify enough Web sites fast enough and keep the databases updated.
Bots also are the basis for comparative shopping sites. If you go to such a site and, say, type in a particular model of DVD player, the bot will search retailers' Web sites and bring back information on price, availability etc. to allow you to compare.
Chatterbots allow a user to ask a question in plain English and get an answer. Bots also can be used to censor profanity on instant messaging services.
Good bots can even help charities, although those efforts can go awry. Freerice.com is a Web site that asks questions. For each right answer it donates 10 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Program. The rice is paid for by sponsors, whose names appear when a correct answer is entered.
Some well-meaning bot writers decided to help and designed bots to automate the answering of questions, thus greatly boosting the amount of rice donated. One bot was able to donate more than 3 million grains of rice in a few hours.
But problems arose because sponsors wanted real people seeing their names, and bots kept valid users off the site. So now freerice.com asks to be bot-free.
The main defense Web sites use against bots was developed at Carnegie Mellon University. You've probably seen a captcha, where you are asked to decode a distorted word and type it in as part of the log-on process. Bots can do a lot of things, but they can't complete a captcha.
So the next time you hear about bots, don't automatically think they're like Megatron, the evil leader of the Decepticons. You could think instead of Rosie, the Jetsons' maid.
(Want to send a question to TechMan? Just fire an e-mail to techman@post-gazette.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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