Introduction to crawlers
Web crawlers (also known as crawling agents, spiders or bots) are applications that visit web pages and gather wanted information. Crawlers collect data from web pages for purposes including indexing and creating web search engines, web archiving, and web page analysis (e.g. SEO analysis). When paired with regulated web scraping, we can use crawlers for services such as competitor price monitoring and data aggregation.
Read more: Web Crawling vs Web Scraping: What’s the difference?
The history of web crawlers
Web crawlers have a history dating back to the beginning of the internet. Here is a brief timeline of the web crawler journey:
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