A web crawler, also known as a web spider, is a type of computer program that is designed to browse the World Wide Web in an automated manner By using algorithms, the goal of a web crawler is to traverse through a website and collect data in order to create an index of the website’s contents. This index can then be used by search engines to quickly find certain keywords and phrases within a website. Additionally, web crawlers are used to index and archive websites, as well as to index information from a wide range of websites to create a large searchable library.
Below are some of the best examples of web crawlers:
1. Googlebot: Googlebot is used by the popular search engine Google to crawl the web and add new content to their index. This involves discovering new pages and gathering information about them in order to make them searchable.
2. Yahoo Slurp: Developed by Yahoo, this web crawler is used to scan the web and add new content to Yahoo’s search engine index.
3. Bingbot: Microsoft’s Bingbot is used to discover new content, index websites, and make them searchable on their search engine, Bing.
4. Alexa Spider: Developed and used by Amazon’s Alexa, this web crawler is used to index websites to determine website rankings and other data.
5. WebCrawler: Developed by Excite and owned by InfoSpace, this web crawler is used to discover and index websites for their search engine.