A search engine spider also known as search engine robot or search engine crawler is a computer program that searches for links and contents throughout the internet and add the sites to search engine index. Search engine spider is an automated program that browses through World Wide Web in a methodical way. Spiders are vital for search engine optimization and without their help the concept of search engine rankings would never have materialized.
History of search engine crawlers
It was in 1993 when Massachusetts Institute of Technology developed world’s first crawler. The web crawler was named World Wide Web Wander and was used to measure the growth of the web. Very soon, an index was generated from the results accumulated by the crawler. The index was what we know today as search engine.
Crawlers have gone through various evolution and innovation since then. In their formative years, they were simple software used to only index specific bit of web page data. However, with the passage of time search engines developed spiders that was able to index other information like visible text and images as well.
How it works
· Spiders first check out the links from one site to another and from one site to another
· Sites which have links from other websites are found out easily by these spiders.
· The more links a site gets from other sites, the more visible the site becomes in the eye of spiders.
· A search engine like google relies heavily on its spiders to create its vast index of listings.
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Some of the most well known search engine crawlers are; Googlebot (Google) MSNBot (MSN), Slurp (Yahoo!) and Teoma crawler (from Ask Jeeves).
The whole process of search engine optimization is running successfully largely due to the presence of latest web spiders.
keshav k solanki is a veteran IT professional with ten years of experience in writing on various technological topics. The author has been associated with various major SEO Company Miami and Website design Miami service providers.