A web crawler, or spider, is a type of bot that is typically operated by search engines like Google and Bing. Their purpose is to index the content of websites all across the Internet so that those websites can appear in search engine results.
What is a web crawler bot?
A web crawler, spider, or search engine bot downloads and indexes content from all over the Internet. The goal of such a bot is to learn what (almost) every webpage on the web is about, so that the information can be retrieved when it's needed. They're called "web crawlers" because crawling is the technical term for automatically accessing a website and obtaining data via a software program.
These bots are almost always operated by search engines. By applying a search algorithm to the data collected by web crawlers, search engines can provide relevant links in response to user search queries, generating the list of webpages that show up after a user types a search into Google or Bing (or another search engine).
A web crawler bot is like someone who goes through all the books in a disorganized library and puts together a card catalog so that anyone who visits the library can quickly and easily find the information they need. To help categorize and sort the library's books by topic, the organizer will read the title, summary, and some of the internal text of each book to figure out what it's about.
However, unlike a library, the Internet is not composed of physical piles of books, and that makes it hard to tell if all the necessary information has been indexed properly, or if vast quantities of it are being overlooked.
To try to find all the relevant information the Internet has to offer, a web crawler bot will start with a certain set of known webpages and then follow hyperlinks from those pages to other pages, follow hyperlinks from those other pages to additional pages, and so on.
What is a web crawler bot?
A web crawler, spider, or search engine bot downloads and indexes content from all over the Internet. The goal of such a bot is to learn what (almost) every webpage on the web is about, so that the information can be retrieved when it's needed. They're called "web crawlers" because crawling is the technical term for automatically accessing a website and obtaining data via a software program.
These bots are almost always operated by search engines. By applying a search algorithm to the data collected by web crawlers, search engines can provide relevant links in response to user search queries, generating the list of webpages that show up after a user types a search into Google or Bing (or another search engine).
A web crawler bot is like someone who goes through all the books in a disorganized library and puts together a card catalog so that anyone who visits the library can quickly and easily find the information they need. To help categorize and sort the library's books by topic, the organizer will read the title, summary, and some of the internal text of each book to figure out what it's about.
However, unlike a library, the Internet is not composed of physical piles of books, and that makes it hard to tell if all the necessary information has been indexed properly, or if vast quantities of it are being overlooked.
To try to find all the relevant information the Internet has to offer, a web crawler bot will start with a certain set of known webpages and then follow hyperlinks from those pages to other pages, follow hyperlinks from those other pages to additional pages, and so on.
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