So what are Robots, Spiders, Web Crawlers, Worms, Ants?
They're all names for the same sort of thing, with slightly different connotations:
- Robots
- the generic name, see above.
- Spiders
- same as robots, but sounds cooler in the press.
- Worms
- same as robots, although technically a worm is a replicating program, unlike a robot.
- Web crawlers
- same as robots, but note WebCrawler is a specific robot
- WebAnts
- distributed cooperating robots.
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