A Different Kind of Game Bot

Want a PlayStation 2? So does everyone else. They appeared briefly in US stores and were snatched up in hours. New shipments appear sporadically and disappear in instants. How do you find a PS2? Crank up a Shopping Bot, of course. According to a CNET article Bots Snarl Sites as Shoppers Seek PlayStation 2, these things are overwhelming the online stores.

Amazon.com, Gohastings.com and Kmart's BlueLight.com are among the online merchants selling PlayStation 2 consoles that have had outages or slowdowns while featuring the popular, and scarce, toy. While Amazon has said its troubles are unrelated to heavy traffic, BlueLight and Gohastings, the Internet arm of Hastings Entertainment, say shopping bots are at least partially responsible for their technical glitches.

"We sat there and watched the site get 80,000 hits in a period of minutes," said Dave Karraker, spokesman for San Francisco-based BlueLight, which has suffered periodic delays in doing business because of heavy traffic. "It's clear to us that there are people using bots to scan the site for the PlayStation 2."