Search by Algolia
Easily integrate Algolia into native apps with FlutterFlow
engineering

Easily integrate Algolia into native apps with FlutterFlow

Algolia's advanced search capabilities pair seamlessly with iOS or Android Apps when using FlutterFlow. App development and search design ...

Chuck Meyer

Sr. Developer Relations Engineer

Algolia's search propels 1,000s of retailers to Black Friday success
e-commerce

Algolia's search propels 1,000s of retailers to Black Friday success

In the midst of the Black Friday shopping frenzy, Algolia soared to new heights, setting new records and delivering an ...

Bernadette Nixon

Chief Executive Officer and Board Member at Algolia

Generative AI’s impact on the ecommerce industry
ai

Generative AI’s impact on the ecommerce industry

When was your last online shopping trip, and how did it go? For consumers, it’s becoming arguably tougher to ...

Vincent Caruana

Senior Digital Marketing Manager, SEO

What’s the average ecommerce conversion rate and how does yours compare?
e-commerce

What’s the average ecommerce conversion rate and how does yours compare?

Have you put your blood, sweat, and tears into perfecting your online store, only to see your conversion rates stuck ...

Vincent Caruana

Senior Digital Marketing Manager, SEO

What are AI chatbots, how do they work, and how have they impacted ecommerce?
ai

What are AI chatbots, how do they work, and how have they impacted ecommerce?

“Hello, how can I help you today?”  This has to be the most tired, but nevertheless tried-and-true ...

Catherine Dee

Search and Discovery writer

Algolia named a leader in IDC MarketScape
algolia

Algolia named a leader in IDC MarketScape

We are proud to announce that Algolia was named a leader in the IDC Marketscape in the Worldwide General-Purpose ...

John Stewart

VP Corporate Marketing

Mastering the channel shift: How leading distributors provide excellent online buying experiences
e-commerce

Mastering the channel shift: How leading distributors provide excellent online buying experiences

Twice a year, B2B Online brings together America’s leading manufacturers and distributors to uncover learnings and industry trends. This ...

Jack Moberger

Director, Sales Enablement & B2B Practice Leader

Large language models (LLMs) vs generative AI: what’s the difference?
ai

Large language models (LLMs) vs generative AI: what’s the difference?

Generative AI and large language models (LLMs). These two cutting-edge AI technologies sound like totally different, incomparable things. One ...

Catherine Dee

Search and Discovery writer

What is generative AI and how does it work?
ai

What is generative AI and how does it work?

ChatGPT, Bing, Bard, YouChat, DALL-E, Jasper…chances are good you’re leveraging some version of generative artificial intelligence on ...

Catherine Dee

Search and Discovery writer

Feature Spotlight: Query Suggestions
product

Feature Spotlight: Query Suggestions

Your users are spoiled. They’re used to Google’s refined and convenient search interface, so they have high expectations ...

Jaden Baptista

Technical Writer

What does it take to build and train a large language model? An introduction
ai

What does it take to build and train a large language model? An introduction

Imagine if, as your final exam for a computer science class, you had to create a real-world large language ...

Vincent Caruana

Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager

The pros and cons of AI language models
ai

The pros and cons of AI language models

What do you think of the OpenAI ChatGPT app and AI language models? There’s lots going on: GPT-3 ...

Catherine Dee

Search and Discovery writer

How AI is transforming merchandising from reactive to proactive
e-commerce

How AI is transforming merchandising from reactive to proactive

In the fast-paced and dynamic realm of digital merchandising, being reactive to customer trends has been the norm. In ...

Lorna Rivera

Staff User Researcher

Top examples of some of the best large language models out there
ai

Top examples of some of the best large language models out there

You’re at a dinner party when the conversation takes a computer-science-y turn. Have you tried ChatGPT? What ...

Vincent Caruana

Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager

What are large language models?
ai

What are large language models?

It’s the era of Big Data, and super-sized language models are the latest stars. When it comes to ...

Catherine Dee

Search and Discovery writer

Mobile search done right: Common pitfalls and best practices
ux

Mobile search done right: Common pitfalls and best practices

Did you know that 86% of the global population uses a smartphone? The 7 billion devices connected to the Internet ...

Alexandre Collin

Staff SME Business & Optimization - UI/UX

Cloud Native meetup: Observability & Sustainability
engineering

Cloud Native meetup: Observability & Sustainability

The Cloud Native Foundation is known for being the organization behind Kubernetes and many other Cloud Native tools. To foster ...

Tim Carry

Algolia DocSearch is now free for all docs sites
product

Algolia DocSearch is now free for all docs sites

TL;DR Revamp your technical documentation search experience with DocSearch! Previously only available to open-source projects, we're excited ...

Shane Afsar

Senior Engineering Manager

Looking for something?

facebookfacebooklinkedinlinkedintwittertwittermailmail

It’s a common experience that happens millions of times a day, and most people take it for granted. You enter a few words in an online search box to find something you want, for instance, a product on an ecommerce website, and voila! It seems to materialize out of thin air. 

But what’s behind the curtain making everything happen so magically? What’s powering that seemingly supercharged search engine?

Web crawlers for digital content

Answer: a website crawler: the hard-working, lesser-known, essential component of a search engine. A web crawler is a bota software programthat systematically visits a website, or sites, and catalogs the data it finds. It’s a figurative bug that methodically locates, chews on, digests, and stores digital content to help create a searchable index. 

Web crawlers work behind the scenes, but they play a critical role. Without crawlersand there are thousands of them around the worldthere would be no instant provision of relevant search results, no easy discovery of desired information and product data.  That’s especially important given that, according to Forbes, as much as 90% of the world’s data is “unstructured.” It’s a digital jungle out there. Companies must determine how to organize and manage a growing amount of digital material so that they can both create elegant online user experiences and quickly find internal business information.

Web spiders of many species

There are several types of web crawler. 

Some are dedicated to collecting and indexing data found on the entire Internet. You’ve undoubtedly heard of Google’s infamous Googlebot. The company also has “subbot” spiders that collect specific types of information. There’s also Bingbot for Microsoft Bing; Baidu Spider, the main web crawler in China; and the Russian web crawler, Yandex.

In addition to the relatively few celebrated whole-Web crawlers, there are tons of smaller and less famous ones creeping unceremoniously across certain segments of the Web.

Content-specific crawling

Some web crawlers are used for gathering only certain types of content, such as email, videos, or images. Googlebot Video and Social Media Crawler are examples of these.

Some crawlers work not only by gathering and organizing content from websites or apps, but from across the world of ecommerce: they can extract specified product information that people need in order to find the right products and make purchasing decisions.

Single-site spiders

Some website crawlers are designed to be used with content on a particular website. 

  • The Octoparse crawler lets you extract data from a site without doing any coding
  • HTTrack Website Copier, a free utility, can download an entire site to a local directory on your computer
  • The customizable and configurable Algolia Crawler can enrich extracted content with business data to enhance the relevance of the user experience

Specialized spiders

Other crawlers are dedicated to particular types of usability and functionality. For example:

  • The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is all about improving companies’ search engine optimization (SEO) for website content 
  • Do you need to crawl content in Java? You can use GitHub’s open-source crawler4j 
  • If you want to get your digital hands on data from sites that use Ajax, JavaScript, or cookies, you could consider Parsehub 

The fruits of crawlers’ labor

If we didn’t have web crawlers, search engines would have no idea that websites have newly available or updated content. Plus, website crawling, extracting, and structuring provides a multitude of other benefits. 

When a web crawler makes it easy for a search engine to understand and accurately represent what’s on your site, you’re closer to getting the right content or product to prospective customers. 

When an ecommerce site makes its product descriptions, images, reviews, and buying information easily discoverable, it’s one step closer to maximizing relevancy and revenue. Information that’s up to date—and immediately available—is indeed powerful.

Crawlers can also surface more information, thereby enriching search results, through their combing of “hidden” content such as metadata, usage data, tags, and relevancy signals.

What to look for in a website crawler

When you’re on the hunt for the perfect website crawler, whether it’s for a website with written content, an application with media content, or an ecommerce store, it can be easy to get overwhelmed by all your options (which, of course, you’ll learn about thanks to the efforts of web crawlers). 

To narrow your search, focus on making sure your new crawler will be all of these things:

Effective. The crawler of your dreams will expertly extract and structure your website content, making it easily deliverable to your visitors and customers, with all of the attendant profit-related benefits that may hold.

Customizable. Regardless of the type of website you have, you want to be able to tailor crawler operations to make sure your spider accurately interprets your unique content and meets your business needs. For instance, you might want crawling to automatically commence at certain times of the day. You might need only certain parts of your site crawled. Your crawler needs to meet your unique data-extraction needs, and to be effortlessly adaptable.

Scalable. If you’re looking to build your business and expand content or product offerings on your site, you need a crawler that can efficiently scale with your organization’s growth and evolving business requirements. 

Production ready. Your crawler should include digital tools that let you imbue users’ search experiences with accurate, timely information. For example, the crawler you select should include a data analysis tool that lets you assess the quality of what your crawler digs up. And it should include a data-monitoring tool that tells you about any errors found during the crawling process.

That’s crawl, folks

Congratulations; you now know some of the key facts about, functions of, and possible features included with the world’s many and varied website crawlers. 

You know the inherent value that web crawling can provide for a business. You understand how a crawler can streamline website operations, quickly get the right information to the right visitors or prospective customers when they request it, and ultimately create better user experiences, increase revenue, and facilitate wide-ranging success. 

And if you have an ecommerce site, you no doubt realize the implications of putting this essential data-gathering tool to work on your company’s behalf, and doing it as efficiently as possible. 

The search is on for your perfect web crawler. Which one will you choose?

Using a crawler to create a leading digital UX

In researching your crawler options, we hope you’ll check out Algolia’s. Our search-as-a-service platform enables companies of all sizes, in countries around the globe, to provide consumers with fast, relevant digital experiences that drive results.

What’s unique about our hosted crawler is that it works across business sectors and industries, including digital media, ecommerce marketplaces, and more. We’ve helped many companies in the Fortune 500, as well as medium-sized organizations and small businesses, create leading digital experiences.

Here are some ways Algolia can help your company unleash your content.

Intrigued? Check out this in-depth webinar on how our crawler can help your business succeed.

Thank you for reading, let us know if you have any questions, and good luck with your web crawler search!

About the author
Catherine Dee

Search and Discovery writer

linkedin

Recommended Articles

Powered byAlgolia Algolia Recommend

Site Crawling & Federated Search: How to make content discoverable
product

Samuel Bodin

Software Engineer Crawler

12 ways to improve your search index
engineering

Jon Silvers

Director, Digital Marketing

Algolia Winter '20 — Grow revenue with Search Experience Management
product

Elliott Gluck

Senior Product Marketing Manager