What Is A Web Crawler?

A web crawler is an internet bot that indexes the content of websites. It can automatically extract target information and data from websites and export data into structured formats (list/table/database).

Have you ever wondered how search engines like Google, fetch data from different parts of the web and serve it to you as a user, based on your query? The method used by applications like this is termed crawling.

Search engines work and by crawling and indexing billions of web pages using different web crawlers called web spiders or search engine bots. What these web spiders do is follow links from each web page that have been indexed to discover new ages.

Is it legal to crawl a website?

So is it legal or illegal? Web scraping and crawling aren't illegal by themselves. After all, you could scrape or crawl your own website, without a hitch. Startups love it because it's a cheap and powerful way to gather data without the need for partnerships.

Step by step to build a web crawler:

- Find websites you want to scrape

- Find the selectors to choose the content to extract

- Tabulate the list of sites and their respected selector into a simple list for easy reference

- Write a simple web scraper program using Python or Node.js.

- Run the scraper with the help of a cron or a scheduler

- Use the extracted content to create a Digestible Content

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