Difference between mobile agent and web crawlers

Question

Can someone tell me the exact difference between mobile agents and web crawlers?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Mobile Agent is a category of Agent Strings that are ment for Mobile Devices have a lok at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_user_agents_for_mobile_phones

Where as web crawlers are Robot programs that are used by different programs like Search engines for indexing pages...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebCrawler

Like one of google's crawler Agent String is "DoCoMo/1.0/P502i/c10 (Google CHTML Proxy/1.0)" which belong to "Google (216.239.39.x) proxy server "

Here is a complete list of Agent strings Including Crawlers,Spiders...

http://www.user-agents.org/

Edit As u requested...

See if someone visits your site and you check his User-Agent. If he is using a Firefox, you will get a string for that, if he is using A mobile Device like an iPhone then u get the user-Agent of the Browser installed on the Mobile. If the visitor is a Crawler then u get the user-Agent String For the same...

Answer 2

Although this question is old, I'd like to elucidate on what purushottam has said.

A mobile agent is a running program (both code and data) that hops (migrates) from one computer to another in a network carrying out a task on someone’s behalf and eventually returning with the results. They might be used, for instance, to install and maintain software on the computers within an organization or to compare the prices of products from a number of vendors by visiting each vendor’s site and performing a series of database operations.

Mobile agents are a potential security threat to the resources in computers that they visit. So the environment receiving an agent should decide which of the local resources it should be allowed to use, based, say, on the identity of the user on whose behalf the agent is acting. In addition, mobile agents can themselves be vulnerable as they may not be able to complete their task if they are refused access to the information they need.

A web crawler on the other hand does not hop from one computer to another. Rather it quietly "browses" (scans) the web, "reading" everything it finds and indexing all it has "read" in a way that that enables it respond to search requests faster.

Answer 3

If I am not wrong, Mobile Agents DONOT necessarily mean that they have to do something with Mobile Devices. Mobile Agents are a special type of agent-codes, that are designed in such a way that they are Mobile in nature.

1. They are called MOBILE not because they work on Mobile Devices, but because the code is mobile i.e. the code has a capability to Move from one place to the other. Mobile Agents provide Code Mobility.
2. To give you an example, if i write a code for searching any item (took this example to compare it with web crawler thing), a mobile agent code will move from your server side to various servers where searching is to take place, process the searching at their side, and then return to you the result.
3. However a crawler works from your side, its code does not travel rather you access data sitting from your server side. This is a different paradigm all together.

I think Shekhar has given you an answer for User Agents for Mobile devices, which technically are not Mobile Agents, but Agents for Mobiles. You can clarify here