Crawler and Scooter: Major Shifts in Meaning
Shikha SaxenaFeb 11 · 4 min read
Computer Program that crawls on websites to collect, store and index information
Web Crawler and Scooter are names given to the computer search engine programs which utilize specific algorithms to move or crawl on the data of new and updated web pages, as submitted by owners to read, collect and store data until all pages and links are read; and improve the search engine results by ranking the pages according to user search on World Wide Web (WWW). Web crawler and Scooter have major shift in the understanding and meaning since internet came to the picture in 1960’s.
Earlier anybody could have explained the meaning of a crawler (one that crawls) generally the term was used to describe locomotion of an insect or a slow moving heavy vehicle that rolls on moving belts, on ground.
Similarly Scooter brings the picture of colorful two wheeler Vespa to your imagination. Talk about it in the new scenario you will be amazed at the shifts in the meanings now and and the pride with which it is explained in new context.
What is Web Crawler?
Web crawler in new context is the program that crawls or moves on each web pages to understand and bring out the information present on the pages with the help of specific algorithms utilized by major search engines as Google, AltaVista, individually or in collaboration (Google, Yahoo and Microsoft).
History of Web search Engine
AltaVista was the earlier Web search engine when Google was not there. Launched on Dec 15, 1995 by Digital Equipment Corporation in Palo Alto, CA, from where Alta Vista derives its name from. Paul Flaherty came up with idea of AltaVista and Louis Monier created the web search tool called Scooter. Michael Burrows has written the indexer. Alta Vista was first searchable full text database system of the web. Alta Vista was a hit with the users and I am one living example of it. Typing queries and receiving answers was ultimate! It was magic!
AltaVista crawler, Scooter was able to index full text pages and users were allowed to limit the search results.
Collaborative Search Engines (CSE)?
As the name suggests Collaborative search engines (CSE) are Web search engines and enterprise intranet search engines which enable the users in search and Information Retrieval (IR) and knowledge sharing in collaborative manner. Experts can share their knowledge with the use of knowledge tags within community of practice.
CSE are explored by both academic and industrial community extensively! SearchTogether is one such CSE where users can share and retrieve information and leave behind the user history that quickens the search made by the incoming next user. SearchTogether is collaborative interface of Search results from standard search engines and Chats to exchange queries and links.
Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have joined efforts to create Schema.org which utilizes their joint effort to help Webmasters to markup their Structured Data on websites and pages to be used for web crawling and indexing their pages.
This in turn helps search engines to understand their pages and index them better when called for by web users. Such marked up pages show improved visibility and rank higher in the search results. Schema.org contains sets of collaborative HTML tags that can be used by webmasters to enable their web pages to be utilized by Crawlers to better understand the content and its relevance.
Search engines crawlers which are also called “spiders” or “bots” crawl on the pages containing structured data embedded with rich snippets to index the pages on world wide web. This helps to bring out the most relevant answers and close data matches, to the queries, typed on Google search.
Schema.org is a set of data tags for different categories as events, questions answers, people name, places and products, ratings , movies, restaurants, books, reviews and so on, ready to be filled with correct data and embedded in main content pages to be recognized by crawler and scooter bots to understand relevance of the pages in a particular context and bring out the browsing results in fraction of seconds.
Lot of work is required to structure data and make its use for different purpose and analysis.
Top 10 search engines and others
Google being undisputable search engine of 2020 used most by people in homes, businesses and organizations in their desktops and mobile is first choice. Other search engines include:
Bing
Yahoo
Baidu
Yandex
DuckDuckGo
AOL
Ask
Dogpile
Ecosia
GMX
Lycos
Naver
Seznam
SwissCows
Yippy
With so many options around consumers can search content, find vast information, learn and utilize knowledge gained for multiple usage!
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WRITTEN BY
Shikha Saxena
A Technical Writer, an artist and blogger by choice. Passionate about reading , writing and editing. http://www.shikhasaxena.com and https://www.dnabox.co/
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