All You Need to Know About Website Crawlers and How to Use them.

Posted by WebDataGuru on September 22nd, 2017

The web is filled with many strange terms and idioms, and it sometimes becomes too difficult to understand them if you’re not the ICT fan type. Website Crawler or Spider is one of those terms. In a simple definition; website crawler online can also be called a web robot or bot that makes it possible to gather data that has been uploaded to websites.

In order words; when a web crawler browses through a given website and scrapes out relevant information in form of data -- it's called website crawling. Good examples of data extracted is email, post articles, phone numbers, videos, pictures and any other type of web content you can think of.

Not to get it twisted; Web Crawler, Spider, Miner, Harvester, and Extractor all points to the same tasking. Though there could be a little difference in procedural approach.

Web Crawling Process and Examples

Now, when a script is programmed to browse through a website and gathers various types of data; this is called Web Crawling. And just any website on the World Wide Web can be crawled by a website crawler except stated otherwise.

Some illustrative examples can be seen on Google.com website crawlers, Bing.com, Yandex.com, Yahoo.com etc.

Important uses of Web Crawlers

Since many legit websites, most especially search engines use crawling as a means of fetching up-to-date data. It is likewise in the same vein that several businesses in the ICT sphere require these crawlers. The process involved in data scraping and warehousing is not as easy as pie, hence, combining web crawler online and other data mining procedures is paramount. Below are some crucial uses of web crawlers:

Indexing of web content

Just as web crawlers browse through a website and marks-out different contents of the website; which includes but not limited to articles, images, and videos. Indexing is what happens. The web robots are able to recognize these contents categorically and presents them when the need is required.

Website Maintenance and Management

Web crawler online is also used in the automation maintenance task process of the website. Some of which include validating of the HTML codes and checking links.

About The Author:

Ronak Shah is the co-founder of WebDataGuru, a brand that deals in web data extraction. WebDataGuru extracts web data based on customer specifications from the targeted websites. They offer various software’s like web crawler software, data collection tools and much more. With an experience of over 7 years in the web data extraction industry, they provide services involving web data extraction, python web scraping and processing right from popular websites extractors to highly customized and specialized price comparison service.