How do Search Engines use Web Crawlers?
What are Web Crawlers?
Have you ever wondered how the information that you’re looking for can be easily found with a single search on search engines such as Google or Bing? With so many pages of information flooding the internet, you would think it would be like finding a needle in a haystack. Luckily, you have someone else to look for that needle for you. That someone is called a web crawler. Web crawlers, often shortened to crawlers, are operated by search engines such as Google that focus on scanning through all the pages on the World Wide Web, crawling and scanning through every page of a website.
How do Web Crawlers Work?
Crawlers begin their job of crawling with a list of known URLS, and then branch off to other pages of a website by following internal links. You can think of internal links as a long piece of rope that connects one page with another, and so on, to create a structure. The crawler slowly climbs the rope, going from page to page to understand the topic and content, with the goal of understanding the structure of the website.
What is the Purpose of Web Crawling?
Now, with all the information that our little crawler has gathered, what does it do with it all? The crawler then stores all of the information into a large index of search engines. Whenever you need information from a search engine, it will pick out pages from the index that it believes will be most helpful in fulfilling your needs.
What's Next?
Although web crawlers are constantly searching through pages and indexing new ones, it may be difficult for it to find your page if it’s not optimized. Optimization allows crawlers to easily find your website and crawl through them, but if the rope that’s connecting the structure of your site is cut, it may not find your most important pages. To learn more about optimization, take a look at how search engine optimization works, here.
