Brian Cryer's Glossary of IT Terms with Links

Web-bot

Web-bot

Web Robot. A generic term applied to any program which retrieves information from websites.

Common examples of web-bots include:

Search engines use web-bots (sometimes also called search-bots or simply bots) to gather (trawl) information from websites, which the search engine will then use to respond to search queries.
An email-harvester will use a web-bot to gather email addresses from web-pages or from newsgroup postings. These are then used by spammers who then spam the harvested email addresses.

A harvester-bot is used spammers to harvest e-mail addresses from web pages.