“A web crawler is a specialized software program used in the field of artificial intelligence and information retrieval.”
Its primary function is to systematically browse the internet, following links from one web page to another, and collecting data from websites. Web crawlers are essential tools for indexing and cataloging vast amounts of web content, making it accessible through search engines and other applications.
Examples of Web Crawlers:
- Amazonbot (Amazon web crawler)
- Bingbot (Bing’s crawler)
- DuckDuck bot (DuckDuckGo’s web crawler)
- Yahoo Slurp (Yahoo’s search engine crawler.
Web crawlers operate by starting from a seed URL or a list of URLs and then traversing the web by following hyperlinks. They download web pages, extract relevant information, and index it for future retrieval. This process is known as web scraping, and it enables search engines like Google to build comprehensive indexes of web content, allowing users to find information quickly.
Web crawlers have applications beyond search engines. They are used in data mining, content monitoring, and competitive analysis. In AI, web crawlers are employed to gather training data for machine learning models, analyze trends, and extract valuable insights from the web’s vast repository of information.