- Robots (in WWW context also called Spiders) are used to navigate
automatically on Ftp, Gopher and WWW servers.
- Robots can search for information in response to a given query,
or a user profile. (They are sometimes called knowbots.)
- Robots are often used to collect data into (index-)databases,
which can be interrogated later.
- Robots often retrieve information in parallel.
The parallel parts are often called agents.
The term agents is also often used in a different context:
when information is retrieved, relevant information is filtered by means
of agents. Users can install agents that automatically select urgent
mail messages, or that select relevant netnews articles and send them
to the user by email.