What is the Definition of Web Crawling and How Does it Work?

What is the definition of web crawling? Have you ever heard of web crawling before? The word indeed does sound very foreign to those who are not very familiar with the intricacies of internet technology. However, in fact, the existence of web crawling is actually very close to us, since we unconsciously use it every day. When we browse the internet to find the various information we need, we are actually giving orders to search engines to do this. Curious about web crawling? We’ve provided a detailed explanation about it below.

What is the Definition of Web Crawling?

Web crawling is an activity of indexing and downloading data (content) from the internet, which will then be stored in the database of a search engine. Web crawling is run by a program or system which is usually called a web crawler, web spiders, spider bots, and web bots.

Every search engine must have a web crawler whose job is to collect (index) all the information data sought by users. This data index activity will allow every search engine user to get the information they need. Further explanation of how web crawling works is in the next point.

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How Does Web Crawling Work?

As already explained above, basically web crawling is an activity of indexing data which will then be stored in search engine databases. Bots from search engines will crawl every keyword you are looking for. From these keywords, the system will immediately search the entire internet and database to display websites that are relevant to these keywords. How it works is roughly described in the steps below.

This is how does web crawling works:

1. Keywords are entered into the search engine bar. For example, the keyword entered is “What is the millennial market?”
2. After the “Enter” keyboard is pressed, the bot system will immediately crawl all information on the internet and databases.
3. Every website found from search results will be indexed.
4. The system or program will see which websites are most relevant to the keywords.

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The relevance standard of a website page is seen from the following factors.

The relevance standard of a website page is seen from the following factors.

1. Routine Visits

Every website indexed by a web crawler will be frequently visited by the system to see if there is any new content from each website. This is done so that the system can ensure that the search results displayed are only the most recent web page of a website. If there are websites that are detected as not actively updating their website pages, there are chances that the website will not be displayed.

2. Abiding to Robots.txt

Robot.txt is a file that is owned by every website, where the file contains information about which pages of the website may and may not be indexed. Web crawlers will look at this file to determine whether or not the website will appear on search engine results pages.

3. The Importance of a Website

Website pages that will be displayed by web crawlers on search results pages (SERPs) are website pages that have a large number of visitors or have high traffic. The large amount of traffic indicates that the website page is useful by users.

Therefore, every time a user searches for that keyword, the web crawler will display the website with the most traffic. The amount of traffic is important, but what is more important is the keywords contained in the website page. If the searched keywords with those on the website are proven to be relevant, then the website will be displayed.

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So you now understand what the definition of web crawling is and how it works, right? Web crawling is basically very important for all aspects of life, including business. An example of such importance is in seeking information about potential customers. You want to find out their profiles, and you wish to obtain more detailed information about them.

After you understand the definition of web crawling, now AdIns is here to provide a solution in the form of PROFIND so that you can know your customers better, especially the millennial customers. With the services of AdIns, you are given the capability of tracking potential customers. That way, your business will experience an increase in the number of customers, including in sales. You can visit AdIns immediately to find the complete information about the demo and full version of PROFIND!