Non-human web: If all people in the world are dead, we would still have trending topics on Twitter

Someone once said “If all people in the world are dead, we would still have trending topics on Twitter”. Why because of bots and other automatic internet-entities. Now for the second year in a row, bot traffic eclipsed human traffic, according to the bot-trackers at Incapsula. This year 61.5 percent of traffic on the web is non-human according to Incapsula. The security firm said that was a 21% rise on last year’s figure of 51%. To generate its report, Incapsula said it observed 1.45 billion bot visits over a 90 day period. You might think this has to do with all objects that are connected to the internet and contribute to the internet of things, but it’s not. This non-human traffic consists of search bots, scrapers, hacking tools, and other human impersonators. All little snippets of code seeding the web. Bots feels like spam, but that is not necessarily the case. The research shows that the biggest growth in traffic was for “good” bots. ‘Good Bots’ are crawlers used by search engines to index content, such as helping the Internet Archive preserve content before it is deleted. Non bot or human traffic will also grow exponentially over the few years. This in facts does have to do with the expanding network we call the internet of things. According to Parks Associates smart grid devices will reach 244 million; e-readers and tablets will be 487 million; networked office devices, 2.37 billion; networked medical devices, 86 million; connected automobiles, 45 million; connected appliances, 547 million; connected military devices, 105 million; IT system devices, 431 million; connected Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) industry automation devices, 45 million; and other connected consumer electronic devices minus smartphones, e- readers and tablets will reach a whopping 5+ billion. Regarding non human web traffic, 2013 is just the tip of the iceberg.