A bot (short for “robot”) is a computer program designed to do automated tasks. When used over the internet, bots can carry out a wide variety of tasks much more quickly and efficiently than a human could, such as crawling a website and gathering data. Most bots, like the ones that search engines use to index pages on the internet, are not intended to harm websites or users. However, spam bots and viruses are examples of programs which can be used for targeted, malicious purposes.