6: Shopbots for E-com

Question 1

What are bots ? What are they alternatively called ?

Answer 1

Computer programs visiting web-sites.

Also called agents, spiders, crawlers, robots, softbots, botnets.

Question 2

What is the activity of collecting information from web pages called ?

Answer 2

Harvesting.

Question 3

How much of all web traffic is made up of bots ?

Answer 3

Half of all traffic.

Question 4

Example application of bots ?

Answer 4

• Find a particular product
• Compare products
• Harvest data
• DDos attack

Question 5

Classification of bots ?

Answer 5

• Chatterbots: talk to humans in natural language
• Commercial intermediaries: act in between 2+ companies, brokering deals
• Government bots: help citizens obtain data or fulfill legal obligatons
• News bots: retrieving news stories
• Newsgroup bots: screen abusive language in posts and comments at many forums
• Update bots: alert users about new releases or (un)expected changes on a website
• Web-developer bots: check if links are current

Question 6

Product brokering ?

Answer 6

• Alerting users to new releases

- Recommending products based on past purchases

Question 7

Merchant brokering ?

Answer 7

• Bot compares shopping across a range of potential suppliers, collecting and analysing data to present to user.
  kayak. com

Question 8

Negotiating bot

Answer 8

Enters auctions or undertakes negotiations on behalf of human user, within parameters set by the user.

Question 9

What are product or merchant brokering types of bots called ?

Answer 9

Shopbots