Web Bot Project

The Web Bot Project, developed in the late 1990's, was created to assist in making stock market predictions. The technology uses a system of spiders to crawl the Internet and search for keywords, much like a search engine does. When a keyword is located, the bot program takes a snapshot of the text preceding and following the keyword. This snapshot of text is sent to a central location where it is then filtered to define meaning A Web crawler is a computer program that browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner. Other terms for Web crawlers are ants, automatic indexers, bots, and worms[1] or Web spider, Web robot, or—especially in the FOAF community—Web scutter[2]. This process is called Web crawling or spidering. Many sites, in particular search engines, use spidering as a means of providing up-to-date data. Web crawlers are mainly used to create a copy of all the visited pages for later processing by a search engine that will index the downloaded pages to provide fast searches. Crawlers can also be used for automating maintenance tasks on a Web site, such as checking links or validating HTML code. Also, crawlers can be used to gather specific types of information from Web pages, such as harvesting e-mail addresses (usually for spam). A Web crawler is one type of bot, or software agent. In general, it starts with a list of URLs to visit, called the seeds. As the crawler visits these URLs, it identifies all the hyperlinks in the page and adds them to the list of URLs to visit, called the crawl frontier. URLs from the frontier are recursively visited according to a set of policies. In June of 2001, the Web Bot Project predicted the a "history altering event" would ocur within 60-90 days. We all know what happened on September 11, 2001. In early 2008, the Web Bot Project predicted the stock market crash of October 2008. Now the Web Bot Project is again predicting a world wide calamity sometime in the 4th quarter of 2012. Just something to think about.