Web Crawler Software

There is an endless number of reasons why a person or company would want to use web crawler software. This type of program browses the web in a designated fashion which could be automated, methodical or in an orderly way. If you’re new to the term web crawler software, perhaps you’ve heard of spiders, bots, ants, automatic indexes, robots or scutters? They’re all basically the same thing!

The Purpose of Web Crawler Software

When you think of web crawling software, you probably picture the big name search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. Their bots crawl through web pages to determine content, relevance and indexing. By creating a copy of visited pages, they can provide faster and more accurate searches. Fetch Technologies will tell you that you certainly do not need to be a search engine to have a need for web crawler software. You simply have to be someone who has the need to gather large amounts or extremely intricate information.

Types of Web Crawler Software

If you plan on using the services of a professional company such as Fetch Technologies, you don’t really need to be concerned with all the complicated lingo regarding web crawler software. Still, it’s helpful to understand a few things about it.

• Focused Crawling – The purpose of this type of web crawler software is to download pages that appear to contain similar information. There are often some flaws associated with this method though and the actual performance of the crawler and outcome are dependent on how rich the links are on that specific topic that is being searched. This type of web crawler software is often used as a starting point to narrow down searches for further crawling.

• URL Normalization – web crawler software will often perform some level of URL normalization which helps reduce repetitive crawling of the same source more than once.

• Restricting Followed Links – In some cases, web crawler software may want to avoid certain web content and only seek out .html pages. To do this, the URL is often examined and then resources will only be requested if there are certain characters in the URL such as .html, .asp, .htm, .php, .aspx, .jspx or .jsp. web crawler software will typically ignore resources with a “?” to avoid spider traps.

• Path-ascending Crawling – Some web crawler software is used to download numerous resources from one particular website. This is very effective at finding those resources which are relatively isolated where an inbound link may not have otherwise been found during normal crawling. Many Fetch customers find this method of web harvesting to collect content or photos from a specific web page quite beneficial.

Why Fetch Technologies?

If you’re interested in web crawling software, that means your needs are probably quite complex and certainly should not be trusted to just anyone. Fetch Technologies has been a recognized leader for many years for delivering very informative and very technical solutions that allow valuable information to become immediately actionable. Their clients use their services to connect to literally millions of websites and gather data for various applications including background screening, data analysis, news aggregation and competitive intelligence.

For more information on web crawler software or the many services and solutions offered by Fetch Technologies, visit their website. Address any questions to sales@fetch.com or 310-414-9849. Regardless if you’re a small business or Fortune 500 company, if you have the need for web crawler software, Fetch has a program designed for you.