Bot

See also spider. A contraction of the word "robot", itself derived from the Czech robota, meaning forced labour or dudgery, adopted by Karel Čapek (1890–1938) in the title of his 1920 play R.U.R.: Rossum's Universal Robots (where it deliberately masquerades as an English word). A bot is an automated tool, in the form of a piece of software, which can crawl across the Internet performing tasks that are useful to copyright owners (such as detecting infringing copies of their works) or detrimental to them - arguably, at least - such as scraping content from their websites so that it might be aggregated with other information. See also scraping.