bot robot At its most general level, a bot is any type of automated software. This covers a pretty wide range of programs, but the term applies specifically to two areas: chat and Web-cataloging software. In online chat, bots can be annoying. One type of bot, KissServ, hails participants with greetings or other cute messages, presumably to draw them into conversation or make them feel welcome. The fact that such a knee-jerk program is called an "annoybot" testifies to how effective it usually is. More sophisticated "chatterbots," such as the Turing experiment called Julia, are programmed to pass for a real person. In the world of Web searching, bots are also called spiders and crawlers. They explore the World Wide Web by retrieving a document and following all the hyperlinks in it; then they generate catalogs that can be accessed by search engines. Popular search sites like Alta Vista, Excite, and Lycos use this method. See also: crawler, spider, Turing experiment