A website crawler software program that systematically scans and indexes web pages, following links to crawl through websites, used by search engines for updating search results
A website crawler, also known as a web crawler or spider, is an automated program that browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner. It is used to systematically scan and index web pages, following hyperlinks to crawl through websites and their content.
The main purpose of a website crawler is to enable search engines to have up-to-date information when users perform searches. The crawler program starts with a list of URLs to visit, identifies all the hyperlinks on those pages, and adds them to the list of pages to crawl. This process continues as the crawler visits the pages, indexes their content, and collects data to be used by search engines.
As the crawler indexed pages, the contents are stored and analyzed to allow for fast, accurate search results. Data such as page titles, content, metadata, structure, keywords, links and more are extracted. This allows search engines to match user queries with relevant pages.
Major search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo all rely on crawlers to index the rapidly growing number of pages on the internet. The speed and efficiency of these crawlers directly impacts the freshness of search results. Content that is not crawled quickly becomes outdated in search engine listings.
Beyond search engines, website crawlers also have other applications like archiving web pages, detecting changes to websites, analyzing site structure, auditing copyright violations or inappropriate content, monitoring sites for security threats, and more.
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