Web crawler

A Web crawler, sometimes called a spider, is an Internet bot which systematically browses the World Wide Web, typically for the purpose of Web indexing (web spidering).

Web search engines and some other sites use Web crawling or spidering software to update their web content or indices of others sites' web content. Web crawlers can copy all the pages they visit for later processing by a search engine which indexes the downloaded pages so the users can search much more efficiently.

Crawlers consume resources on the systems they visit and often visit sites without tacit approval. Issues of schedule, load, and "politeness" come into play when large collections of pages are accessed. Mechanisms exist for public sites not wishing to be crawled to make this known to the crawling agent. For instance, including a robots.txt file can request bots to index only parts of a website, or nothing at all.

As the number of pages on the internet is extremely large, even the largest crawlers fall short of making a complete index. For that reason search engines were bad at giving relevant search results in the early years of the World Wide Web, before the year 2000. This is improved greatly by modern search engines, nowadays very good results are given instantly.

Crawlers can validate hyperlinks and HTML code. They can also be used for web scraping (see also data-driven programming).

A Web crawler may also be called a Web spider, an ant, an automatic indexer, or (in the FOAF software context) a Web scutter.

A Web crawler starts with a list of URLs to visit, called the seeds. As the crawler visits these URLs, it identifies all the hyperlinks in the page and adds them to the list of URLs to visit, called the crawl frontier. URLs from the frontier are recursively visited according to a set of policies. If the crawler is performing archiving of websites it copies and saves the information as it goes. The archives are usually stored in such a way they can be viewed, read and navigated as they were on the live web, but are preserved as ‘snapshots'.

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Wikipedia