technical
Beginner
Web Crawler
/wɛb ˈkrɔːlər/
Automated programs used by search engines to discover and scan web pages.
Detailed Explanation
Web crawlers, also called spiders or bots, systematically browse the web to find new pages and update existing ones in search engine indexes. They follow links and collect information about page content.
Examples
Googlebot - Google's primary crawler
Bingbot - Microsoft's crawler
Crawling frequency based on site importance
Following internal and external links
Respecting robots.txt directives
Related Terms
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