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RevBot FAQs Exactly what is a Bot? A traditional intelligent agent, also called a bot, works on behalf of a large centralized database such as those maintained by search engine companies by scouring a network looking for content. For example, Google's bot that continuously scans the entire Internet, visiting nearly every website on it, is called "Googlebot." Today, every significant search engine uses a traditional bot to scan the Internet, and bots can be found in vertical markets, working with specific enterprise applications. So, what then is a RevBot? A RevBot, a patent pending invention by Contrieve engineers, flips the paradigm of a traditional bot upside down. Instead of scanning a myriad of websites to maintain a centralized database, a reverse bot, or "RevBot," works on behalf of a website and looks to push that site's content to multiple different network locations. Rather than waiting for a bot to come around whenever that might be to see if its content has changed, a website can proactively and instantly push updates to other network nodes that it wants to keep up to date. Can RevBots interact with other network applications besides search engines? Yes. We talk about search engines a lot because it is their network database operations with which most people are familiar, so they help us to get our points across. In fact, RevBots are very flexible and powerful tools based on reprogrammable set of rules that enable them to adapt for interacting with specialty websites, databases, and enterprise applications. How does a RevBot work? Depending on load and scale, a typical RevBot operates as an independent process on the same server as the website for which it is associated. When a change is made to the content of the website, the RevBot instantly detects the change and transmits information about it in a fast and secure manner to other network nodes like search engines. This way, network nodes are kept continuously up to date. Why is that so great? In the traditional bot model, bots slowly cull the content of a large network. Google, MSN and Yahoo bots visit most websites every month or so. Often, in enterprise applications, someone has to manually request updates or the updates occur every night at, say, 3 a.m. A RevBot model has a website's RevBot "pushing" information about changes as they occur. As a result, there is no delay, inaccuracy, or "broken links" in remote references or copies of content. When RevBots are installed for search applications, it is not uncommon to see update rates staggeringly improve in the range of 50,000 times (5,000,000%), not to mention the dramatic improvement in content accuracy. What does that mean to a typical small to medium size commercial website? Having an immediate response to changes in a website's content allows web surfers to be directed to the site in a timely and accurate manner for announcements, new product offerings, sales and discounts, to name a few examples. In the traditional bot model, those same changes would either not be picked up or be so out of date as to drive traffic inaccurately. Essentially, RevBots help to bring in new customers and avoid the negative situation of having disgruntled ex-potential customers who just saw, for example, references to a sale that ended weeks ago. So, a RevBot's job is to push content? That's just the beginning. RevBots offer additional features such as summarizing and classifying content by providing a synopsis, a blurb or other metadata which would not otherwise be available. As a result, RevBots can be used to more accurately categorize content and, also, to let search engines know about deep content blocked by access codes that would otherwise remain hidden for fear of it being used without proper authorization and/or compensation. Also, by talking about "changes to content," we were keeping the discussion simple. Actually, RevBots can be triggered by different types of events of which changes to content are one. Other types of events can be based on physical location, network address, metadata (in various classifications), local hardware configuration and resource allocation (e.g. storage usage). Being able to handle events generally but in an ad hoc fashion propels RevBot technology into mobile, network management, and security territories. Beside search engines, what are the markets for RevBots? Major markets for RevBots include Government and Enterprise. By automatically converting data between and tying together disparate databases and applications for government, R&D, manufacturing, accounting, finance and banking, employee workload is reduced and accuracy improved by eliminating the extra steps of rekeying and adapting data. Aren't their other computing technologies such as XML and SOAP that do the same thing? Not quite. XML is only a data format specification and SOAP is only a communications protocol, so neither can do anything by itself. XML and SOAP need to be implemented by an active application, such as a RevBot. RevBots make use of established and proven data formats and technologies to provide a complete solution to solving some of today's more vexing network problems. What specific enterprise-aware products do RevBots support? Currently, our targeted enterprise-aware platforms include Microsoft Office products including Excel, Access and Word along with a variety of products from SAP, Great Plains, JD Edwards, Cognos, SQL Server and MySQL. Other platforms are being added, and we can probably customize a RevBot for you if you use legacy, uncommon or even custom products. Can RevBots be hacked? Nothing in the public space is 100% secure. That said, rest assured that RevBots employ state of the art data encryption technologies that make it as difficult as possible for any security breach to occur. How easy is it to install a RevBot? Although the exact process can vary, installing a RevBot typically takes no more effort than downloading and running a zipped executable. Once installed, you will need about five to ten minutes to set up your parameters. How much support does a RevBot require? RevBots are designed to run on most websites without any ongoing maintenance. There will be occasional upgrades and changes to parameters that you may have to make. How much does a RevBot cost? Since each website varies in size, content, number of users, bandwidth usage, etc., at this time, we prefer to quote each RevBot implemetation separately after asking a series of questions. This way, we can get you the most bang for your buck. Please contact us for details. Can I get more technical details on RevBots? Yes, see our RevBots web page that includes technical datasheets. Also, For more information on related products such as RevBot Receivers and Proxy Servers, please see our technology section. |