What is a Search Engine Spider?
A Search Engine spider, sometimes called a web crawler, is how search engines gather their results. Search Engines use Spiders to crawl through websites and extract relevant information in regards to the word or phrase that the user has searched for. Search Engines use this technique to gain up to date information in their results. Spiders usually make duplicate copies of every page that has been visited; this is for later processing which is done by the search engine, who will then index the downloaded pages which will enable the fast searches that we all take for granted.
Spiders have other uses too, including; automatic maintenance on servers or websites, with jobs including link checking and HTML code validation. Spiders are also used in black hat e-mail harvesting and this is usually for spamming purposes. Spiders are an effective way of easily carrying out what would be a tedious chore for any human.
Due to the vast size of the internet, and with websites being created and updated constantly, the spiders are always crawling through the internet. Yet, with such a massive collection of websites, it is more than likely that by the time a spider has finished crawling and downloading the final pages from a website, it is more than probable that those websites have had pages added, edited or even deleted.
Without spiders crawling through the most relevant web pages, the search engines would take a lot longer to retrieve the results you have searched for. As a Spider downloads a small amount of website pages (no search engine indexes more than 16%), Search engines realise that their users want to have the most relative results and not just random websites. The most relevant web sites are found by prioritising them based on factors such as link popularity, its content quality and other factors to be later developed in the manual series.
The spiders are an important way of quickly gathering, storing and searching through information to enable us, as search engine users, to benefit from fast paced results.
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