Web Crawlers
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A Web crawler, sometimes called a spider or spiderbot and often shortened to crawler, is an
Internet bot An Internet bot, web robot, robot or simply bot, is a software application that runs automated tasks (scripts) over the Internet, usually with the intent to imitate human activity on the Internet, such as messaging, on a large scale. An Internet b ...
that systematically browses the
World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet. Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web se ...
and that is typically operated by search engines for the purpose of
Web indexing Web indexing, or internet indexing, comprises methods for indexing the contents of a website or of the Internet as a whole. Individual websites or intranets may use a back-of-the-book index, while search engines usually use keywords and metadata t ...
(''web spidering'').
Web search engine A search engine is a software system designed to carry out web searches. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The search results are generally presented in a ...
s and some other
website A website (also written as a web site) is a collection of web pages and related content that is identified by a common domain name and published on at least one web server. Examples of notable websites are Google Search, Google, Facebook, Amaz ...
s use Web crawling or spidering
software Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...
to update their
web content Web content is the wikt:text, text, visual system, visual or audio signal, audio Content (media), content that is made available online and user encountered as part of the online usage and user experience, experience on websites. It may include t ...
or indices of other sites' web content. Web crawlers copy pages for processing by a search engine, which
indexes Index (or its plural form indices) may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Fictional entities * Index (''A Certain Magical Index''), a character in the light novel series ''A Certain Magical Index'' * The Index, an item on a Halo megastru ...
the downloaded pages so that users can search more efficiently. Crawlers consume resources on visited systems and often visit sites unprompted. Issues of schedule, load, and "politeness" come into play when large collections of pages are accessed. Mechanisms exist for public sites not wishing to be crawled to make this known to the crawling agent. For example, including a
robots.txt The robots exclusion standard, also known as the robots exclusion protocol or simply robots.txt, is a standard used by websites to indicate to visiting web crawlers and other web robots which portions of the site they are allowed to visit. Th ...
file can request
bots The British Overseas Territories (BOTs), also known as the United Kingdom Overseas Territories (UKOTs), are fourteen territories with a constitutional and historical link with the United Kingdom. They are the last remnants of the former Bri ...
to index only parts of a website, or nothing at all. The number of Internet pages is extremely large; even the largest crawlers fall short of making a complete index. For this reason, search engines struggled to give relevant search results in the early years of the World Wide Web, before 2000. Today, relevant results are given almost instantly. Crawlers can validate hyperlinks and
HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScri ...
code. They can also be used for
web scraping Web scraping, web harvesting, or web data extraction is data scraping used for extracting data from websites. Web scraping software may directly access the World Wide Web using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol or a web browser. While web scrapin ...
and
data-driven programming In computer programming, data-driven programming is a programming paradigm in which the program statements describe the data to be matched and the processing required rather than defining a sequence of steps to be taken. Standard examples of dat ...
.


Nomenclature

A web crawler is also known as a ''spider'', an ''ant'', an ''automatic indexer'', or (in the
FOAF FOAF (an acronym of friend of a friend) is a machine-readable ontology describing persons, their activities and their relations to other people and objects. Anyone can use FOAF to describe themselves. FOAF allows groups of people to describe soc ...
software context) a ''Web scutter''.


Overview

A Web crawler starts with a list of
URLs A Uniform Resource Locator (URL), colloquially termed as a web address, is a reference to a web resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. A URL is a specific type of Uniform Resource Identifie ...
to visit. Those first URLs are called the ''seeds''. As the crawler visits these URLs, by communicating with
web server A web server is computer software and underlying hardware that accepts requests via HTTP (the network protocol created to distribute web content) or its secure variant HTTPS. A user agent, commonly a web browser or web crawler, initiate ...
s that respond to those URLs, it identifies all the hyperlinks in the retrieved web pages and adds them to the list of URLs to visit, called the ''
crawl frontier A crawl frontier is a data structure used for storage of URLs eligible for crawling and supporting such operations as adding URLs and selecting for crawl. Sometimes it can be seen as a priority queue. Overview A crawl frontier is one of the com ...
''. URLs from the frontier are
recursively Recursion (adjective: ''recursive'') occurs when a thing is defined in terms of itself or of its type. Recursion is used in a variety of disciplines ranging from linguistics to logic. The most common application of recursion is in mathematics ...
visited according to a set of policies. If the crawler is performing archiving of
website A website (also written as a web site) is a collection of web pages and related content that is identified by a common domain name and published on at least one web server. Examples of notable websites are Google Search, Google, Facebook, Amaz ...
s (or
web archiving Web archiving is the process of collecting portions of the World Wide Web to ensure the information is preserved in an archive for future researchers, historians, and the public. Web archivists typically employ web crawlers for automated captur ...
), it copies and saves the information as it goes. The archives are usually stored in such a way they can be viewed, read and navigated as if they were on the live web, but are preserved as 'snapshots'. The archive is known as the ''repository'' and is designed to store and manage the collection of web pages. The
repository Repository may refer to: Archives and online databases * Content repository, a database with an associated set of data management tools, allowing application-independent access to the content * Disciplinary repository (or subject repository), an ...
only stores
HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScri ...
pages and these pages are stored as distinct files. A repository is similar to any other system that stores data, like a modern-day database. The only difference is that a repository does not need all the functionality offered by a database system. The repository stores the most recent version of the web page retrieved by the crawler. The large volume implies the crawler can only download a limited number of the Web pages within a given time, so it needs to prioritize its downloads. The high rate of change can imply the pages might have already been updated or even deleted. The number of possible URLs crawled being generated by server-side software has also made it difficult for web crawlers to avoid retrieving
duplicate content Duplicate content is a term used in the field of search engine optimization to describe content that appears on more than one web page. The duplicate content can be substantial parts of the content within or across domains and can be either exactly ...
. Endless combinations of
HTTP GET The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web, w ...
(URL-based) parameters exist, of which only a small selection will actually return unique content. For example, a simple online photo gallery may offer three options to users, as specified through
HTTP The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web, ...
GET parameters in the URL. If there exist four ways to sort images, three choices of
thumbnail Thumbnails are reduced-size versions of pictures or videos, used to help in recognizing and organizing them, serving the same role for images as a normal text index does for words. In the age of digital images, visual search engines and image ...
size, two file formats, and an option to disable user-provided content, then the same set of content can be accessed with 48 different URLs, all of which may be linked on the site. This
mathematical combination In mathematics, a combination is a selection of items from a set that has distinct members, such that the order of selection does not matter (unlike permutations). For example, given three fruits, say an apple, an orange and a pear, there are t ...
creates a problem for crawlers, as they must sort through endless combinations of relatively minor scripted changes in order to retrieve unique content. As Edwards ''et al.'' noted, "Given that the
bandwidth Bandwidth commonly refers to: * Bandwidth (signal processing) or ''analog bandwidth'', ''frequency bandwidth'', or ''radio bandwidth'', a measure of the width of a frequency range * Bandwidth (computing), the rate of data transfer, bit rate or thr ...
for conducting crawls is neither infinite nor free, it is becoming essential to crawl the Web in not only a scalable, but efficient way, if some reasonable measure of quality or freshness is to be maintained." A crawler must carefully choose at each step which pages to visit next.


Crawling policy

The behavior of a Web crawler is the outcome of a combination of policies: * a ''selection policy'' which states the pages to download, * a ''re-visit policy'' which states when to check for changes to the pages, * a ''politeness policy'' that states how to avoid overloading
Web sites A website (also written as a web site) is a collection of web pages and related content that is identified by a common domain name and published on at least one web server. Examples of notable websites are Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Wikip ...
. * a ''parallelization policy'' that states how to coordinate distributed web crawlers.


Selection policy

Given the current size of the Web, even large search engines cover only a portion of the publicly available part. A 2009 study showed even large-scale
search engines A search engine is a software system designed to carry out web searches. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The search results are generally presented in a ...
index no more than 40-70% of the indexable Web; a previous study by
Steve Lawrence Steve Lawrence (born Sidney Liebowitz; July 8, 1935) is an American singer, comedian and actor, best known as a member of a duo with his wife Eydie Gormé, billed as " Steve and Eydie", and for his performance as Maury Sline, the manager and fr ...
and
Lee Giles Clyde Lee Giles is an American computer scientist and the David Reese Professor at the College of Information Sciences and Technology at the Pennsylvania State University. He is also Graduate Faculty Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, ...
showed that no search engine indexed more than 16% of the Web in 1999. As a crawler always downloads just a fraction of the Web pages, it is highly desirable for the downloaded fraction to contain the most relevant pages and not just a random sample of the Web. This requires a metric of importance for prioritizing Web pages. The importance of a page is a function of its
intrinsic In science and engineering, an intrinsic property is a property of a specified subject that exists itself or within the subject. An extrinsic property is not essential or inherent to the subject that is being characterized. For example, mass ...
quality, its popularity in terms of links or visits, and even of its URL (the latter is the case of vertical search engines restricted to a single
top-level domain A top-level domain (TLD) is one of the domains at the highest level in the hierarchical Domain Name System of the Internet after the root domain. The top-level domain names are installed in the root zone of the name space. For all domains in ...
, or search engines restricted to a fixed Web site). Designing a good selection policy has an added difficulty: it must work with partial information, as the complete set of Web pages is not known during crawling. Junghoo Cho ''et al.'' made the first study on policies for crawling scheduling. Their data set was a 180,000-pages crawl from the stanford.edu domain, in which a crawling simulation was done with different strategies. The ordering metrics tested were
breadth-first Breadth-first search (BFS) is an algorithm for searching a tree data structure for a node that satisfies a given property. It starts at the tree root and explores all nodes at the present depth prior to moving on to the nodes at the next de ...
,
backlink A backlink is a link from some other website (the referrer) to that web resource (the referent). A ''web resource'' may be (for example) a website, web page, or web directory. A backlink is a reference comparable to a citation. The quantity, q ...
count and partial
PageRank PageRank (PR) is an algorithm used by Google Search to rank web pages in their search engine results. It is named after both the term "web page" and co-founder Larry Page. PageRank is a way of measuring the importance of website pages. According ...
calculations. One of the conclusions was that if the crawler wants to download pages with high Pagerank early during the crawling process, then the partial Pagerank strategy is the better, followed by breadth-first and backlink-count. However, these results are for just a single domain. Cho also wrote his PhD dissertation at Stanford on web crawling. Najork and Wiener performed an actual crawl on 328 million pages, using breadth-first ordering. They found that a breadth-first crawl captures pages with high Pagerank early in the crawl (but they did not compare this strategy against other strategies). The explanation given by the authors for this result is that "the most important pages have many links to them from numerous hosts, and those links will be found early, regardless of on which host or page the crawl originates." Abiteboul designed a crawling strategy based on an
algorithm In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific Computational problem, problems or to perform a computation. Algorithms are used as specificat ...
called OPIC (On-line Page Importance Computation). In OPIC, each page is given an initial sum of "cash" that is distributed equally among the pages it points to. It is similar to a PageRank computation, but it is faster and is only done in one step. An OPIC-driven crawler downloads first the pages in the crawling frontier with higher amounts of "cash". Experiments were carried in a 100,000-pages synthetic graph with a power-law distribution of in-links. However, there was no comparison with other strategies nor experiments in the real Web. Boldi ''et al.'' used simulation on subsets of the Web of 40 million pages from the .it domain and 100 million pages from the WebBase crawl, testing breadth-first against depth-first, random ordering and an omniscient strategy. The comparison was based on how well PageRank computed on a partial crawl approximates the true PageRank value. Surprisingly, some visits that accumulate PageRank very quickly (most notably, breadth-first and the omniscient visit) provide very poor progressive approximations. Baeza-Yates ''et al.'' used simulation on two subsets of the Web of 3 million pages from the .gr and .cl domain, testing several crawling strategies.Baeza-Yates, R., Castillo, C., Marin, M. and Rodriguez, A. (2005)
Crawling a Country: Better Strategies than Breadth-First for Web Page Ordering
In Proceedings of the Industrial and Practical Experience track of the 14th conference on World Wide Web, pages 864–872, Chiba, Japan. ACM Press.
They showed that both the OPIC strategy and a strategy that uses the length of the per-site queues are better than
breadth-first Breadth-first search (BFS) is an algorithm for searching a tree data structure for a node that satisfies a given property. It starts at the tree root and explores all nodes at the present depth prior to moving on to the nodes at the next de ...
crawling, and that it is also very effective to use a previous crawl, when it is available, to guide the current one. Daneshpajouh ''et al.'' designed a community based algorithm for discovering good seeds. Their method crawls web pages with high PageRank from different communities in less iteration in comparison with crawl starting from random seeds. One can extract good seed from a previously-crawled-Web graph using this new method. Using these seeds, a new crawl can be very effective.


Restricting followed links

A crawler may only want to seek out HTML pages and avoid all other
MIME types A media type (also known as a MIME type) is a two-part identifier for file formats and format contents transmitted on the Internet. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) is the official authority for the standardization and publication o ...
. In order to request only HTML resources, a crawler may make an HTTP HEAD request to determine a Web resource's MIME type before requesting the entire resource with a GET request. To avoid making numerous HEAD requests, a crawler may examine the URL and only request a resource if the URL ends with certain characters such as .html, .htm, .asp, .aspx, .php, .jsp, .jspx or a slash. This strategy may cause numerous HTML Web resources to be unintentionally skipped. Some crawlers may also avoid requesting any resources that have a "?" in them (are dynamically produced) in order to avoid
spider trap A spider trap (or crawler trap) is a set of web pages that may intentionally or unintentionally be used to cause a web crawler or search bot to make an infinite number of requests or cause a poorly constructed crawler to crash. Web crawlers are a ...
s that may cause the crawler to download an infinite number of URLs from a Web site. This strategy is unreliable if the site uses
URL rewriting In web applications, a rewrite engine is a software component that performs rewriting on URLs (Uniform Resource Locators), modifying their appearance. This modification is called URL rewriting. It is a way of implementing URL mapping or routing ...
to simplify its URLs.


URL normalization

Crawlers usually perform some type of
URL normalization URI normalization is the process by which URIs are modified and standardized in a consistent manner. The goal of the normalization process is to transform a URI into a normalized URI so it is possible to determine if two syntactically differen ...
in order to avoid crawling the same resource more than once. The term ''URL normalization'', also called ''URL canonicalization'', refers to the process of modifying and standardizing a URL in a consistent manner. There are several types of normalization that may be performed including conversion of URLs to lowercase, removal of "." and ".." segments, and adding trailing slashes to the non-empty path component.


Path-ascending crawling

Some crawlers intend to download/upload as many resources as possible from a particular web site. So ''path-ascending crawler'' was introduced that would ascend to every path in each URL that it intends to crawl. For example, when given a seed URL of http://llama.org/hamster/monkey/page.html, it will attempt to crawl /hamster/monkey/, /hamster/, and /. Cothey found that a path-ascending crawler was very effective in finding isolated resources, or resources for which no inbound link would have been found in regular crawling.


Focused crawling

The importance of a page for a crawler can also be expressed as a function of the similarity of a page to a given query. Web crawlers that attempt to download pages that are similar to each other are called focused crawler or topical crawlers. The concepts of topical and focused crawling were first introduced by
Filippo Menczer Filippo Menczer is an American and Italian professor of informatics and computer science who is the former director at the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research, a research unit of the Indiana University School of Informatics, Computi ...
and by Soumen Chakrabarti ''et al.'' The main problem in focused crawling is that in the context of a Web crawler, we would like to be able to predict the similarity of the text of a given page to the query before actually downloading the page. A possible predictor is the anchor text of links; this was the approach taken by PinkertonPinkerton, B. (1994)
Finding what people want: Experiences with the WebCrawler
In Proceedings of the First World Wide Web Conference, Geneva, Switzerland.
in the first web crawler of the early days of the Web. Diligenti ''et al.'' propose using the complete content of the pages already visited to infer the similarity between the driving query and the pages that have not been visited yet. The performance of a focused crawling depends mostly on the richness of links in the specific topic being searched, and a focused crawling usually relies on a general Web search engine for providing starting points.


=Academic focused crawler

= An example of the
focused crawlers A focused crawler is a web crawler that collects Web pages that satisfy some specific property, by carefully prioritizing the crawl frontier and managing the hyperlink exploration process. Some predicates may be based on simple, deterministic and s ...
are academic crawlers, which crawls free-access academic related documents, such as the ''citeseerxbot'', which is the crawler of
CiteSeer CiteSeerX (formerly called CiteSeer) is a public search engine and digital library for scientific and academic papers, primarily in the fields of computer and information science. CiteSeer's goal is to improve the dissemination and access of ac ...
X search engine. Other academic search engines are
Google Scholar Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes p ...
and
Microsoft Academic Search Microsoft Academic Search was a research project and academic search engine retired in 2012. It relaunched in 2016 as Academic. History Microsoft launched a search tool called Windows Live Academic Search in 2006 to directly compete with Google ...
etc. Because most academic papers are published in
PDF Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. ...
formats, such kind of crawler is particularly interested in crawling
PDF Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. ...
,
PostScript PostScript (PS) is a page description language in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm. It is a dynamically typed, concatenative programming language. It was created at Adobe Systems by John Warnock, Charles Geschke, Doug Br ...
files,
Microsoft Word Microsoft Word is a word processing software developed by Microsoft. It was first released on October 25, 1983, under the name ''Multi-Tool Word'' for Xenix systems. Subsequent versions were later written for several other platforms includin ...
including their
zipped A zipper, zip, fly, or zip fastener, formerly known as a clasp locker, is a commonly used device for binding together two edges of fabric or other flexible material. Used in clothing (e.g. jackets and jeans), luggage and other bags, camping ...
formats. Because of this, general open-source crawlers, such as
Heritrix Heritrix is a web crawler designed for web archiving. It was written by the Internet Archive. It is available under a free software license and written in Java. The main interface is accessible using a web browser, and there is a command-line too ...
, must be customized to filter out other
MIME types A media type (also known as a MIME type) is a two-part identifier for file formats and format contents transmitted on the Internet. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) is the official authority for the standardization and publication o ...
, or a
middleware Middleware is a type of computer software that provides services to software applications beyond those available from the operating system. It can be described as "software glue". Middleware makes it easier for software developers to implement co ...
is used to extract these documents out and import them to the focused crawl database and repository. Identifying whether these documents are academic or not is challenging and can add a significant overhead to the crawling process, so this is performed as a post crawling process using
machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...
or
regular expression A regular expression (shortened as regex or regexp; sometimes referred to as rational expression) is a sequence of characters that specifies a search pattern in text. Usually such patterns are used by string-searching algorithms for "find" or ...
algorithms. These academic documents are usually obtained from home pages of faculties and students or from publication page of research institutes. Because academic documents make up only a small fraction of all web pages, a good seed selection is important in boosting the efficiencies of these web crawlers. Other academic crawlers may download plain text and
HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScri ...
files, that contains
metadata Metadata is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive metadata – the descriptive ...
of academic papers, such as titles, papers, and abstracts. This increases the overall number of papers, but a significant fraction may not provide free
PDF Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. ...
downloads.


=Semantic focused crawler

= Another type of focused crawlers is semantic focused crawler, which makes use of domain ontologies to represent topical maps and link Web pages with relevant ontological concepts for the selection and categorization purposes. In addition, ontologies can be automatically updated in the crawling process. Dong et al. introduced such an ontology-learning-based crawler using a support-vector machine to update the content of ontological concepts when crawling Web pages.


Re-visit policy

The Web has a very dynamic nature, and crawling a fraction of the Web can take weeks or months. By the time a Web crawler has finished its crawl, many events could have happened, including creations, updates, and deletions. From the search engine's point of view, there is a cost associated with not detecting an event, and thus having an outdated copy of a resource. The most-used cost functions are freshness and age. Freshness: This is a binary measure that indicates whether the local copy is accurate or not. The freshness of a page ''p'' in the repository at time ''t'' is defined as: : F_p(t) = \begin 1 & ~p~~t\\ 0 & \end Age: This is a measure that indicates how outdated the local copy is. The age of a page ''p'' in the repository, at time ''t'' is defined as: : A_p(t) = \begin 0 & ~p~~t\\ t - ~p & \end Coffman ''et al.'' worked with a definition of the objective of a Web crawler that is equivalent to freshness, but use a different wording: they propose that a crawler must minimize the fraction of time pages remain outdated. They also noted that the problem of Web crawling can be modeled as a multiple-queue, single-server polling system, on which the Web crawler is the server and the Web sites are the queues. Page modifications are the arrival of the customers, and switch-over times are the interval between page accesses to a single Web site. Under this model, mean waiting time for a customer in the polling system is equivalent to the average age for the Web crawler. The objective of the crawler is to keep the average freshness of pages in its collection as high as possible, or to keep the average age of pages as low as possible. These objectives are not equivalent: in the first case, the crawler is just concerned with how many pages are out-dated, while in the second case, the crawler is concerned with how old the local copies of pages are. Two simple re-visiting policies were studied by Cho and Garcia-Molina: * Uniform policy: This involves re-visiting all pages in the collection with the same frequency, regardless of their rates of change. * Proportional policy: This involves re-visiting more often the pages that change more frequently. The visiting frequency is directly proportional to the (estimated) change frequency. In both cases, the repeated crawling order of pages can be done either in a random or a fixed order. Cho and Garcia-Molina proved the surprising result that, in terms of average freshness, the uniform policy outperforms the proportional policy in both a simulated Web and a real Web crawl. Intuitively, the reasoning is that, as web crawlers have a limit to how many pages they can crawl in a given time frame, (1) they will allocate too many new crawls to rapidly changing pages at the expense of less frequently updating pages, and (2) the freshness of rapidly changing pages lasts for shorter period than that of less frequently changing pages. In other words, a proportional policy allocates more resources to crawling frequently updating pages, but experiences less overall freshness time from them. To improve freshness, the crawler should penalize the elements that change too often. The optimal re-visiting policy is neither the uniform policy nor the proportional policy. The optimal method for keeping average freshness high includes ignoring the pages that change too often, and the optimal for keeping average age low is to use access frequencies that monotonically (and sub-linearly) increase with the rate of change of each page. In both cases, the optimal is closer to the uniform policy than to the proportional policy: as Coffman ''et al.'' note, "in order to minimize the expected obsolescence time, the accesses to any particular page should be kept as evenly spaced as possible". Explicit formulas for the re-visit policy are not attainable in general, but they are obtained numerically, as they depend on the distribution of page changes. Cho and Garcia-Molina show that the exponential distribution is a good fit for describing page changes, while Ipeirotis ''et al.'' show how to use statistical tools to discover parameters that affect this distribution. Note that the re-visiting policies considered here regard all pages as homogeneous in terms of quality ("all pages on the Web are worth the same"), something that is not a realistic scenario, so further information about the Web page quality should be included to achieve a better crawling policy.


Politeness policy

Crawlers can retrieve data much quicker and in greater depth than human searchers, so they can have a crippling impact on the performance of a site. If a single crawler is performing multiple requests per second and/or downloading large files, a server can have a hard time keeping up with requests from multiple crawlers. As noted by Koster, the use of Web crawlers is useful for a number of tasks, but comes with a price for the general community. The costs of using Web crawlers include: * network resources, as crawlers require considerable bandwidth and operate with a high degree of parallelism during a long period of time; * server overload, especially if the frequency of accesses to a given server is too high; * poorly written crawlers, which can crash servers or routers, or which download pages they cannot handle; and * personal crawlers that, if deployed by too many users, can disrupt networks and Web servers. A partial solution to these problems is the robots exclusion protocol, also known as the robots.txt protocol that is a standard for administrators to indicate which parts of their Web servers should not be accessed by crawlers. This standard does not include a suggestion for the interval of visits to the same server, even though this interval is the most effective way of avoiding server overload. Recently commercial search engines like
Google Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...
,
Ask Jeeves Ask.com (originally known as Ask Jeeves) is a question answering–focused e-business founded in 1996 by Garrett Gruener and David Warthen in Berkeley, California. The original software was implemented by Gary Chevsky, from his own design. Wart ...
,
MSN MSN (meaning Microsoft Network) is a web portal and related collection of Internet services and apps for Windows and mobile devices, provided by Microsoft and launched on August 24, 1995, alongside the release of Windows 95. The Microsoft Net ...
and
Yahoo! Search Yahoo! Search is a Yahoo! internet search provider that uses Microsoft's Microsoft Bing, Bing search engine to power results, since 2009, apart from four years with Google Search, Google until 2019. Originally, "Yahoo! Search" referred to a Yah ...
are able to use an extra "Crawl-delay:" parameter in the
robots.txt The robots exclusion standard, also known as the robots exclusion protocol or simply robots.txt, is a standard used by websites to indicate to visiting web crawlers and other web robots which portions of the site they are allowed to visit. Th ...
file to indicate the number of seconds to delay between requests. The first proposed interval between successive pageloads was 60 seconds. However, if pages were downloaded at this rate from a website with more than 100,000 pages over a perfect connection with zero latency and infinite bandwidth, it would take more than 2 months to download only that entire Web site; also, only a fraction of the resources from that Web server would be used. This does not seem acceptable. Cho uses 10 seconds as an interval for accesses, and the WIRE crawler uses 15 seconds as the default.Baeza-Yates, R. and Castillo, C. (2002)
Balancing volume, quality and freshness in Web crawling
In Soft Computing Systems – Design, Management and Applications, pages 565–572, Santiago, Chile. IOS Press Amsterdam.
The MercatorWeb crawler follows an adaptive politeness policy: if it took ''t'' seconds to download a document from a given server, the crawler waits for 10''t'' seconds before downloading the next page. Dill ''et al.'' use 1 second. For those using Web crawlers for research purposes, a more detailed cost-benefit analysis is needed and ethical considerations should be taken into account when deciding where to crawl and how fast to crawl. Anecdotal evidence from access logs shows that access intervals from known crawlers vary between 20 seconds and 3–4 minutes. It is worth noticing that even when being very polite, and taking all the safeguards to avoid overloading Web servers, some complaints from Web server administrators are received. Brin and
Page Page most commonly refers to: * Page (paper), one side of a leaf of paper, as in a book Page, PAGE, pages, or paging may also refer to: Roles * Page (assistance occupation), a professional occupation * Page (servant), traditionally a young m ...
note that: "... running a crawler which connects to more than half a million servers (...) generates a fair amount of e-mail and phone calls. Because of the vast number of people coming on line, there are always those who do not know what a crawler is, because this is the first one they have seen."


Parallelization policy

A
parallel Parallel is a geometric term of location which may refer to: Computing * Parallel algorithm * Parallel computing * Parallel metaheuristic * Parallel (software), a UNIX utility for running programs in parallel * Parallel Sysplex, a cluster of ...
crawler is a crawler that runs multiple processes in parallel. The goal is to maximize the download rate while minimizing the overhead from parallelization and to avoid repeated downloads of the same page. To avoid downloading the same page more than once, the crawling system requires a policy for assigning the new URLs discovered during the crawling process, as the same URL can be found by two different crawling processes.


Architectures

A crawler must not only have a good crawling strategy, as noted in the previous sections, but it should also have a highly optimized architecture. Shkapenyuk and Suel noted that:Shkapenyuk, V. and Suel, T. (2002)
Design and implementation of a high performance distributed web crawler
In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), pages 357-368, San Jose, California. IEEE CS Press.
Web crawlers are a central part of search engines, and details on their algorithms and architecture are kept as business secrets. When crawler designs are published, there is often an important lack of detail that prevents others from reproducing the work. There are also emerging concerns about " search engine spamming", which prevent major search engines from publishing their ranking algorithms.


Security

While most of the website owners are keen to have their pages indexed as broadly as possible to have strong presence in
search engines A search engine is a software system designed to carry out web searches. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The search results are generally presented in a ...
, web crawling can also have
unintended consequences In the social sciences, unintended consequences (sometimes unanticipated consequences or unforeseen consequences) are outcomes of a purposeful action that are not intended or foreseen. The term was popularised in the twentieth century by Ameri ...
and lead to a
compromise To compromise is to make a deal between different parties where each party gives up part of their demand. In arguments, compromise is a concept of finding agreement through communication, through a mutual acceptance of terms—often involving va ...
or data breach if a search engine indexes resources that shouldn't be publicly available, or pages revealing potentially vulnerable versions of software. Apart from standard
web application security Application security (short AppSec) includes all tasks that introduce a secure software development life cycle to development teams. Its final goal is to improve security practices and, through that, to find, fix and preferably prevent security i ...
recommendations website owners can reduce their exposure to opportunistic hacking by only allowing search engines to index the public parts of their websites (with
robots.txt The robots exclusion standard, also known as the robots exclusion protocol or simply robots.txt, is a standard used by websites to indicate to visiting web crawlers and other web robots which portions of the site they are allowed to visit. Th ...
) and explicitly blocking them from indexing transactional parts (login pages, private pages, etc.).


Crawler identification

Web crawlers typically identify themselves to a Web server by using the
User-agent In computing, a user agent is any software, acting on behalf of a user, which "retrieves, renders and facilitates end-user interaction with Web content". A user agent is therefore a special kind of software agent. Some prominent examples of us ...
field of an
HTTP The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web, ...
request. Web site administrators typically examine their
Web server A web server is computer software and underlying hardware that accepts requests via HTTP (the network protocol created to distribute web content) or its secure variant HTTPS. A user agent, commonly a web browser or web crawler, initiate ...
s' log and use the user agent field to determine which crawlers have visited the web server and how often. The user agent field may include a URL where the Web site administrator may find out more information about the crawler. Examining Web server log is tedious task, and therefore some administrators use tools to identify, track and verify Web crawlers. Spambots and other malicious Web crawlers are unlikely to place identifying information in the user agent field, or they may mask their identity as a browser or other well-known crawler. Web site administrators prefer Web crawlers to identify themselves so that they can contact the owner if needed. In some cases, crawlers may be accidentally trapped in a crawler trap or they may be overloading a Web server with requests, and the owner needs to stop the crawler. Identification is also useful for administrators that are interested in knowing when they may expect their Web pages to be indexed by a particular
search engine A search engine is a software system designed to carry out web searches. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The search results are generally presented in a ...
.


Crawling the deep web

A vast amount of web pages lie in the deep or invisible web. These pages are typically only accessible by submitting queries to a database, and regular crawlers are unable to find these pages if there are no links that point to them. Google's
Sitemaps The Sitemaps protocol allows a webmaster to inform search engines about URLs on a website that are available for crawling. A Sitemap is an XML file that lists the URLs for a site. It allows webmasters to include additional information about ea ...
protocol and
mod oai Mod, MOD or mods may refer to: Places * Modesto City–County Airport, Stanislaus County, California, US Arts, entertainment, and media Music * Mods (band), a Norwegian rock band * M.O.D. (Method of Destruction), a band from New York City, US ...
are intended to allow discovery of these deep-Web resources. Deep web crawling also multiplies the number of web links to be crawled. Some crawlers only take some of the URLs in <a href="URL"> form. In some cases, such as the
Googlebot Googlebot is the web crawler software used by Google that collects documents from the web to build a searchable index for the Google Search engine. This name is actually used to refer to two different types of web crawlers: a desktop crawler (to ...
, Web crawling is done on all text contained inside the hypertext content, tags, or text. Strategic approaches may be taken to target deep Web content. With a technique called
screen scraping Data scraping is a technique where a computer program extracts data from human-readable output coming from another program. Description Normally, data transfer between programs is accomplished using data structures suited for automated processin ...
, specialized software may be customized to automatically and repeatedly query a given Web form with the intention of aggregating the resulting data. Such software can be used to span multiple Web forms across multiple Websites. Data extracted from the results of one Web form submission can be taken and applied as input to another Web form thus establishing continuity across the Deep Web in a way not possible with traditional web crawlers. Pages built on
AJAX Ajax may refer to: Greek mythology and tragedy * Ajax the Great, a Greek mythological hero, son of King Telamon and Periboea * Ajax the Lesser, a Greek mythological hero, son of Oileus, the king of Locris * ''Ajax'' (play), by the ancient Greek ...
are among those causing problems to web crawlers. Google has proposed a format of AJAX calls that their bot can recognize and index.


Visual vs programmatic crawlers

There are a number of "visual web scraper/crawler" products available on the web which will crawl pages and structure data into columns and rows based on the users requirements. One of the main difference between a classic and a visual crawler is the level of programming ability required to set up a crawler. The latest generation of "visual scrapers" remove the majority of the programming skill needed to be able to program and start a crawl to scrape web data. The visual scraping/crawling method relies on the user "teaching" a piece of crawler technology, which then follows patterns in semi-structured data sources. The dominant method for teaching a visual crawler is by highlighting data in a browser and training columns and rows. While the technology is not new, for example it was the basis of Needlebase which has been bought by Google (as part of a larger acquisition of ITA Labs), there is continued growth and investment in this area by investors and end-users.


List of web crawlers

The following is a list of published crawler architectures for general-purpose crawlers (excluding focused web crawlers), with a brief description that includes the names given to the different components and outstanding features:


Historical web crawlers

* World Wide Web Worm was a crawler used to build a simple index of document titles and URLs. The index could be searched by using the
grep grep is a command-line utility for searching plain-text data sets for lines that match a regular expression. Its name comes from the ed command ''g/re/p'' (''globally search for a regular expression and print matching lines''), which has the sa ...
Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and ot ...
command. * Yahoo! Slurp was the name of the
Yahoo! Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds managed by Apollo Global Man ...
Search crawler until Yahoo! contracted with
Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...
to use
Bingbot Bingbot is a web-crawling robot (type of internet bot), deployed by Microsoft October 2010 to supply Bing. It collects documents from the web to build a searchable index for the Bing (search engine). It performs the same function as Google's '' G ...
instead.


In-house web crawlers

* Applebot is
Apple An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple fruit tree, trees are agriculture, cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus ''Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, wh ...
's web crawler. It supports
Siri Siri ( ) is a virtual assistant that is part of Apple Inc.'s iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, macOS, tvOS, and audioOS operating systems. It uses voice queries, gesture based control, focus-tracking and a natural-language user interface to answer qu ...
and other products. *
Bingbot Bingbot is a web-crawling robot (type of internet bot), deployed by Microsoft October 2010 to supply Bing. It collects documents from the web to build a searchable index for the Bing (search engine). It performs the same function as Google's '' G ...
is the name of Microsoft's
Bing Bing most often refers to: * Bing Crosby (1903–1977), American singer * Microsoft Bing, a web search engine Bing may also refer to: Food and drink * Bing (bread), a Chinese flatbread * Bing (soft drink), a UK brand * Bing cherry, a varie ...
webcrawler. It replaced ''
Msnbot Msnbot was a web-crawling robot (type of internet bot), deployed by Microsoft to collect documents from the web to build a searchable index for the MSN Search engine. It went into beta in 2004, and had full public release in 2005. The month of Octo ...
''. * Baiduspider is
Baidu Baidu, Inc. ( ; , meaning "hundred times") is a Chinese multinational technology company specializing in Internet-related services and products and artificial intelligence (AI), headquartered in Beijing's Haidian District. It is one of the la ...
's web crawler. *
Googlebot Googlebot is the web crawler software used by Google that collects documents from the web to build a searchable index for the Google Search engine. This name is actually used to refer to two different types of web crawlers: a desktop crawler (to ...
is described in some detail, but the reference is only about an early version of its architecture, which was written in C++ and
Python Python may refer to: Snakes * Pythonidae, a family of nonvenomous snakes found in Africa, Asia, and Australia ** ''Python'' (genus), a genus of Pythonidae found in Africa and Asia * Python (mythology), a mythical serpent Computing * Python (pro ...
. The crawler was integrated with the indexing process, because text parsing was done for full-text indexing and also for URL extraction. There is a URL server that sends lists of URLs to be fetched by several crawling processes. During parsing, the URLs found were passed to a URL server that checked if the URL have been previously seen. If not, the URL was added to the queue of the URL server. *
WebCrawler WebCrawler is a search engine, and one of the oldest surviving search engines on the web today. For many years, it operated as a metasearch engine. WebCrawler was the first web search engine to provide full text search. History Brian Pinkerto ...
was used to build the first publicly available full-text index of a subset of the Web. It was based on lib-WWW to download pages, and another program to parse and order URLs for breadth-first exploration of the Web graph. It also included a real-time crawler that followed links based on the similarity of the anchor text with the provided query. * WebFountain is a distributed, modular crawler similar to Mercator but written in C++. *
Xenon Xenon is a chemical element with the symbol Xe and atomic number 54. It is a dense, colorless, odorless noble gas found in Earth's atmosphere in trace amounts. Although generally unreactive, it can undergo a few chemical reactions such as the ...
is a web crawler used by government tax authorities to detect fraud.


Commercial web crawlers

The following web crawlers are available, for a price:: *
Diffbot Diffbot is a developer of machine learning and computer vision algorithms and public APIs for extracting data from web pages / web scraping to create a knowledge base. The company has gained interest from its application of computer vision te ...
- programmatic general web crawler, available as an
API An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how ...
*
SortSite ''SortSite'' is a web crawler that scans entire websites for quality issues including accessibility, browser compatibility, broken links, legal compliance, search optimization, usability and web standards compliance. Tests, standards and checkpoi ...
- crawler for analyzing websites, available for
Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...
and
Mac OS Two major famlies of Mac operating systems were developed by Apple Inc. In 1984, Apple debuted the operating system that is now known as the "Classic" Mac OS with its release of the original Macintosh System Software. The system, rebranded "M ...
* Swiftbot -
Swiftype Swiftype is a search and index company based in San Francisco, California, that provides search software for organizations, websites, and computer programs. Notable customers include AT&T, Dr. Pepper, Hubspot and TechCrunch. History Swiftype was ...
's web crawler, available as
software as a service Software as a service (SaaS ) is a software licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted. SaaS is also known as "on-demand software" and Web-based/Web-hosted software. SaaS is con ...


Open-source crawlers

* GNU Wget is a
command-line A command-line interpreter or command-line processor uses a command-line interface (CLI) to receive commands from a user in the form of lines of text. This provides a means of setting parameters for the environment, invoking executables and pro ...
-operated crawler written in C and released under the
GPL The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general u ...
. It is typically used to mirror Web and FTP sites. *
GRUB Grub can refer to Grub (larva), of the beetle superfamily Scarabaeoidea, or as a slang term for food. It can also refer to: Places * Grub, Appenzell Ausserrhoden, Switzerland * Grub, St. Gallen, Switzerland * Grub (Amerang), a hamlet in Bavaria, ...
was an open source distributed search crawler that
Wikia Search Wikia Search was a short-lived free and open-source web search engine launched by Wikia, a for-profit wiki-hosting company founded in late 2004 by Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley. Wikia Search followed other experiments by Wikia into search eng ...
used to crawl the web. *
Heritrix Heritrix is a web crawler designed for web archiving. It was written by the Internet Archive. It is available under a free software license and written in Java. The main interface is accessible using a web browser, and there is a command-line too ...
is the
Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, ...
's archival-quality crawler, designed for archiving periodic snapshots of a large portion of the Web. It was written in
Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's List ...
. * ht://Dig includes a Web crawler in its indexing engine. *
HTTrack HTTrack is a free and open-source Web crawler and offline browser, developed by Xavier Roche and licensed under the GNU General Public License Version 3. HTTrack allows users to download World Wide Web sites from the Internet to a local computer. ...
uses a Web crawler to create a mirror of a web site for off-line viewing. It is written in C and released under the
GPL The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general u ...
. *
mnoGoSearch mnoGoSearch is an open-source web search engine for Microsoft Windows and Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1 ...
is a crawler, indexer and a search engine written in C and licensed under the
GPL The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general u ...
(*NIX machines only) *
Apache Nutch Apache Nutch is a highly extensible and scalable open source web crawler software project. Features Nutch is coded entirely in the Java programming language, but data is written in language-independent formats. It has a highly modular architec ...
is a highly extensible and scalable web crawler written in Java and released under an Apache License. It is based on Apache Hadoop and can be used with
Apache Solr Solr (pronounced "solar") is an open-source enterprise-search platform, written in Java. Its major features include full-text search, hit highlighting, faceted search, real-time indexing, dynamic clustering, database integration, NoSQL features a ...
or
Elasticsearch Elasticsearch is a search engine based on the Lucene library. It provides a distributed, multitenant-capable full-text search engine with an HTTP web interface and schema-free JSON documents. Elasticsearch is developed in Java and is dual ...
. *
Open Search Server OpenSearchServer is an open-source application server allowing development of index-based applications such as search engines. Available since April 2009 on SourceForge for download, OpenSearchServer was developed under the GPL v3 license and of ...
is a search engine and web crawler software release under the
GPL The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general u ...
. *
Scrapy Scrapy ( ) is a free and open-source Web crawler, web-crawling Web framework, framework written in Python and developed in Cambuslang. Originally designed for web scraping, it can also be used to extract data using Application programming interf ...
, an open source webcrawler framework, written in python (licensed under
BSD The Berkeley Software Distribution or Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) is a discontinued operating system based on Research Unix, developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berk ...
). *
Seeks Seeks is a free and open-source project licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License version 3 (AGPL-3.0-or-later). It exists to create an alternative to the current market-leading search engines, driven by user concerns rather than cor ...
, a free distributed search engine (licensed under AGPL). *
StormCrawler StormCrawler is an open-source collection of resources for building low-latency, scalable web crawlers on  Apache Storm. It is provided under Apache License and is written mostly in Java (programming language). StormCrawler is modular and ...
, a collection of resources for building low-latency, scalable web crawlers on
Apache Storm Apache Storm is a distributed stream processing computation framework written predominantly in the Clojure programming language. Originally created by Nathan Marz and team at BackType, the project was open sourced after being acquired by Twitter. ...
( Apache License). *
tkWWW Robot tkWWW is an early, now discontinued web browser and WYSIWYG HTML editor written by Joseph Wang at MIT as part of Project Athena and the Globewide Network Academy project. The browser was based on the Tcl language and the Tk (toolkit) extensio ...
, a crawler based on the
tkWWW tkWWW is an early, now discontinued web browser and WYSIWYG HTML editor written by Joseph Wang at MIT as part of Project Athena and the Globewide Network Academy project. The browser was based on the Tcl language and the Tk (toolkit) extension ...
web browser (licensed under
GPL The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general u ...
). *
Xapian Xapian is a free and open-source probabilistic information retrieval library, released under the GNU General Public License (GPL). It is a full-text search engine library for programmers. It is written in C++, with bindings to allow use from ...
, a search crawler engine, written in c++. *
YaCy ''YaCy'' (pronounced “ya see”) is a free distributed search engine, built on the principles of peer-to-peer (P2P) networks created by Michael Christen in 2003. The engine is written in Java and distributed on several hundred computers, , so- ...
, a free distributed search engine, built on principles of peer-to-peer networks (licensed under
GPL The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general u ...
).


See also

*
Automatic indexing Automatic indexing is the computerized process of scanning large volumes of documents against a controlled vocabulary, taxonomy, thesaurus or ontology and using those controlled terms to quickly and effectively index large electronic document de ...
* Gnutella crawler *
Web archiving Web archiving is the process of collecting portions of the World Wide Web to ensure the information is preserved in an archive for future researchers, historians, and the public. Web archivists typically employ web crawlers for automated captur ...
*
Webgraph The webgraph describes the directed links between pages of the World Wide Web. A graph, in general, consists of several vertices, some pairs connected by edges. In a directed graph, edges are directed lines or arcs. The webgraph is a directed graph ...
*
Website mirroring software An offline reader (sometimes called an offline browser or offline navigator) is computer software that downloads e-mail, newsgroup posts or web pages, making them available when the computer is offline: not connected to a server. Offline readers ...
* Search Engine Scraping *
Web scraping Web scraping, web harvesting, or web data extraction is data scraping used for extracting data from websites. Web scraping software may directly access the World Wide Web using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol or a web browser. While web scrapin ...


References


Further reading

* Cho, Junghoo
"Web Crawling Project"
UCLA Computer Science Department.

from
Wiley Wiley may refer to: Locations * Wiley, Colorado, a U.S. town * Wiley, Pleasants County, West Virginia, U.S. * Wiley-Kaserne, a district of the city of Neu-Ulm, Germany People * Wiley (musician), British grime MC, rapper, and producer * Wiley Mil ...

WIVET
is a benchmarking project by
OWASP The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) is an online community that produces freely-available articles, methodologies, documentation, tools, and technologies in the field of web application security. The OWASP provides free and open ...
, which aims to measure if a web crawler can identify all the hyperlinks in a target website. * Shestakov, Denis
"Current Challenges in Web Crawling"
an
"Intelligent Web Crawling"
slides for tutorials given at ICWE'13 and WI-IAT'13.
A History of Search Engines
from Blogingguru {{DEFAULTSORT:Web crawler Search engine software Internet search algorithms