The non-human web has overtaken the human web, according to new data from Incapsula, which tracks bots on the web.
The non-human web is made of search engine crawlers, spammers, hackers, scrapers, and impersonators.
The search crawlers are good bots, says Incapsula. The rest are not. Here's the damage they do, according to Incapsula:
- The scrapers steal content and create duplicates.
- The Hackers steal data, inject malware, and hijack websites.
- The spammers jam up sites with crap, can post malware, and could screw up a website.
- The impersonators can do DDoS attacks, suck up bandwidth, and do marketing intelligence gathering.
We spotted this chart from Alexis Madrigal at the Atlantic, who has a great write up of what this means. He sums up what it means by saying, "It's so easy to build bots that do various things that they are overrunning the human traffic on the web." As a result of these bots, website traffic is getting thrown askew, which is destroying the quality of what we see.
