Web Crawling

Web crawling is an important technology that helps search engines search online content. Let us learn about this terminology in depth.

What is Web Crawling?

It is an automated task that analyzes the content of websites on the web. Web crawling is carried out by a web crawler, which is also known as a spider bot. It checks every website by visiting each page. This way, spider bot helps search engines like Google to discover and index in the database. It is pretty important to keep search results relevant.

The role of bots is to collect information, including relevant links, website contents, and the structure of sites. Thereafter, engines use this info to rank the sites and create the right indices.

How does web crawling work?

The web crawling process isn’t straightforward. It begins with the known URLs. The spider bot goes to each web address to check pages and extracts data. Moreover, it also locates new URLs by checking the inbound and outbound links. This way, a web crawler or engine bot increases the array of webpages. This website crawling process is carried out constantly for data processing as well as website indexing.

It is important to note that website crawling is based on a file called robots.txt. This directs the web crawler to which page to visit. The scraping tools also follow the same rule.

Web Crawling vs. Web Scraping: difference

People often get confused between the terms web crawling and web scraping. Both of these are different processes. As mentioned, website crawling helps to index websites and give relevant search engine results. On the other hand, web scraping is related to eaxtracts specific data or specific information from any website. Generally, the goal of web scrapers is to get useful contents for business growth or search purposes. Also, scrapers extract data using a proxy or VPN.

Pros & Cons

Crawling helps search engines to locate sites with reliable content fast. This way, searching for relevant content becomes easy for the user. But unfortunately, the use of too many spider bots can impact the speed of the server. 

Examples

Big search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo depend on web crawlers to index websites. They are also used for SEO to analyze website structure. Many online ad experts use web spiders to check and compare prices.