Tomorrow's bots will be even more so. Early bots crawled the Internet for information. Archie looked for software available through the Net's file-transfer protocol. The World Wide Web Wanderer and its successors scoured the Web for sites to list on search engines. Of course, some bots simply annoy.
Spam bots collect e-mail addresses from online newsgroups for marketing pitches.
Chatter bots often do little but visit chat rooms while poorly pretending to be humans. But other bots can be enjoyable. A bot named Digital frequents a chat room at Observers.net to give the latest weather and explain technical terms. Popular or not, bots have become essential in many respects. Imagine surfing for information without access to search engines.