crawler

Crawler, in the context of computing, refers to a software program that systematically browses the World Wide Web to retrieve, discover, and index pages. Also known as a spider or bot, a crawler is designed to follow hyperlinks from page to page and to collect data for search engines, archives, or data-mining applications.

Operation: It typically begins with a seed set of URLs, fetches the corresponding documents, parses their content, extracts links, and enqueues new targets for subsequent fetches. To manage scale, crawlers employ scheduling, politeness policies, and discovery heuristics. They may render pages to access dynamic content and store results in an index or dataset for quick retrieval.

Types: Broadly, general-purpose crawlers index the web for search engines; focused or vertical crawlers target specific topics or data types; incremental or real-time crawlers update existing indexes; and discovery crawlers monitor changes in known sites. Browsing strategies include breadth-first and depth-first traversal, as well as probabilistic or prioritized heuristics.

Standards and ethics: Crawlers typically identify themselves with a user-agent string and many obey the robots.txt standard, which can block access to certain parts of a site. Meta robots tags can influence indexing. Responsible crawling avoids overloading servers and respects copyright, privacy, and contractual limitations.

Applications and challenges: Web search, archiving, and data mining rely on crawlers. Challenges include scale, dynamic content, duplicate data, crawl budgets, legal constraints, and anti-crawling measures. Advances address rendering JavaScript, storage efficiency, and selective indexing to maintain up-to-date, quality results.