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Encyclopedia of Database Systems pp 4608–4611Cite as

Web Crawler Architecture

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Synonyms

Robot; Spider; Web crawler

Definition

A web crawler is a program that, given one or more seed URLs, downloads the web pages associated with these URLs, extracts any hyperlinks contained in them, and recursively continues to download the web pages identified by these hyperlinks. Web crawlers are an important component of web search engines, where they are used to collect the corpus of web pages indexed by the search engine. Moreover, they are used in many other applications that process large numbers of web pages, such as web data mining, comparison shopping engines, and so on. Despite their conceptual simplicity, implementing high-performance web crawlers poses major engineering challenges due to the scale of the web. In order to crawl a substantial fraction of the “surface web” in a reasonable amount of time, web crawlers must download thousands of pages per second, and are typically distributed over tens or hundreds of computers. Their two main data structures – the...

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Recommended Reading

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Google, Inc., Mountain View, CA, USA

    Marc Najork

Authors
  1. Marc Najork
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Marc Najork .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Ling Liu

  2. University of Waterloo School of Computer Science, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. Tamer Özsu

Section Editor information

  1. Google Research, New York, NY, USA

    Cong Yu

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© 2018 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature

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Najork, M. (2018). Web Crawler Architecture. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_457

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