Discovering New Trends in Web Robot Traffic Through Functional Classification

This paper proposes a novel functional classification scheme to understand and analyze web robot traffic. The scheme is rooted in the recognition that the crawling behavior of a robot on a site is primarily governed byits intended purpose or functionality. We apply the classification rules to analyze web server access logs from the University of Connecticut School of Engineering domain. The analysis results indicate how the classification scheme can provide insights into the robot traffic based on their functionality.