September 2002
Intermediate to advanced
656 pages
22h 14m
English
book
HTTP: The Definitive Guide
by David Gourley, Brian Totty, Marjorie Sayer, Anshu Aggarwal, Sailu Reddy
Content preview from HTTP: The Definitive GuideBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 9. Web Robots
We continue our tour of HTTP architecture with a close look at the self-animating user agents called web robots.
Web robots are software programs that automate a series of web transactions without human interaction. Many robots wander from web site to web site, fetching content, following hyperlinks, and processing the data they find. These kinds of robots are given colorful names such as “crawlers,” “spiders,” “worms,” and “bots” because of the way they automatically explore web sites, seemingly with minds of their own.
Here are a few examples of web robots:
Stock-graphing robots issue HTTP GETs to stock market servers every few minutes and use the data to build stock price trend graphs.
Web-census robots gather “census” information about the scale and evolution of the World Wide Web. They wander the Web counting the number of pages and recording the size, language, and media type of each page.[1]
Search-engine robots collect all the documents they find to create search databases.
Comparison-shopping robots gather web pages from online store catalogs to build databases of products and their prices.
[1] http://www.netcraft.com collects great census metrics on what flavors of servers are being used by sites around the Web.
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.