Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers

Stealth Means Simulating Human Patterns

Webbots that don't draw attention to themselves are ones that behave like people and leave normal-looking records in log files. For this reason, you want your webbot to simulate normal human activity. In short, stealthy webbots don't act like machines.

Be Kind to Your Resources

Possibly the worst thing your webbot can do is consume too much bandwidth from an individual website. To limit the amount of bandwidth a webbot uses, you need to restrict the amount of activity it has at any one website. Whatever you do, don't write a webbot that frequently makes requests from the same source. Since your webbot doesn't read the downloaded web pages and click links as a person would, it is capable of downloading pages ...