What Is a Web Crawler and How Does It Work
Originally published as https://www.octoparse.com/blog/what-is-a-web-crawler-and-how-does-it-work-at-your-benefit/?blogger= on March 28, 2022. A web crawler, also known as a web spider or search engine bot, is a bot that visits and indexes the content of web pages all over the Internet. With such an enormous amount of information, a search engine will be able to present its users' relevant information in the search results. What is a Web Crawler? The goal of a web crawler is to get information, often keep getting fresh information to fuel a search engine. If a search engine is a supermarket, what a web crawler does is like grand sourcing — it visits different websites/web pages, browses, and has the information stored in its own warehouse. When a customer comes over and asks for something, there will be certain goods to offer on the shelves. It sources by indexing web pages and the content they contain. The indexed content will be ready for retrieval and when a user searche...