'Non humans' account for over half of all web traffic

"By one study's measure, slightly more than half of all the Internet's traffic comes from computers not being used by fleshy humans that might actually purchase products.
That's according to study released today by Incapsula, an Internet security firm, begging the question: What exactly does Internet traffic from a "non-human" look like? Incapsula is here to explain: "hackers, spambots, scrapers and spies of sorts collecting proprietary business information and customer data from unsuspecting websites." "Hackers" (5 percent) refers to hacking software that visits site to swipe credit-card information or crash sites (think of the ubiquitous DDoS attacks). "Scrapers" (another 5 percent) refer to bots that copy content from other sites and post it on their own, to get search-engine traffic. Altogether, the robotic ne'er-do-wells cited above constitutes 31 percent of all web traffic. The other 20 percent is the search engines themselves, the Googles and Bings of the Interwebbed world, whose servers work 'round-the-clock to index the Internet for our browsing pleasure."

Source:  Atlantic Wire, 15th March 2012