Web Crawling
Web crawling is the automated process of systematically browsing the World Wide Web to collect and index data from websites. It involves using software programs called web crawlers or spiders to traverse web pages by following hyperlinks, extracting content such as text, images, and metadata. This technique is fundamental for search engines, data mining, and web archiving to gather information at scale.
Developers should learn web crawling when building applications that require large-scale data collection from the internet, such as search engines, price comparison tools, or market research platforms. It is essential for tasks like web scraping, SEO analysis, and monitoring website changes, enabling automation of data extraction that would be impractical manually. Mastery of web crawling helps in handling dynamic content, respecting robots.txt policies, and managing rate limits to avoid legal issues.