Crawling Websites: How Search Engines Discover Web Pages - Research Paper

Introduction

A crawler visits websites, access information and downloads their links to discover additional pages as well as create search engine entries. Crawlers work by visiting a list of URLs through which it downloads and stores information. The crawlers then forward the information to the search engine, which then ranks the web pages based on various characteristics (Marsden, 2018). The crawler itself does not organize the pages. When the crawlers visit a webpage, they request for a robot.txt file. The robot.txt informs the crawler on what files to request and the directories it is not permitted to visit. The robots.txt file also comprises URL lists that a site wants to be crawled by a crawler.

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Crawlers make use of several rules and algorithms in determining the frequency of re-crawling a page and the number of site pages to be indexed. An instance if this is where a webpage that us updated regularly. Such a page might be crawled more often compared to another page that is infrequently updated.

Crawlers identify new pages by re-crawling and extracting links from existing familiar pages to get new URLs for other pages. The new extracted links are then included to the crawling queue for later downloads. As a result of this process, search engines discover all publicly-available web pages on the internet that are, to some point interrelated to at least one other webpage (Thornton, 2018). An example is when an individual searches for hippo pages. The crawlers check their indexes and provide a list of pages mentioning hippos.

Impact of Utilizing Mobile Technologies in Optimizing Search Engine Practices

With the rapid growth in mobile technologies, Google requires that all websites be mobile optimized by making them more mobile-friendly. The utilization of mobile technologies has resulted in high traffic volumes from mobile users. As a result, Google requires website owners to develop websites that are run on both mobile devices and desktops for them to achieve high rankings (Miller, 2016). By developing mobile-friendly websites, search-engine practices are also optimized based on huge traffic. When mobile users search for some information online, a list appears showing the highest searched words relating to the information the user is searching. By clicking on this multiplying effect, the search engine is optimized, doubling the traffic sent to a particular website.

The utilization of mobile technologies has also resulted in the development of great responsive websites in terms of speed. Webpages that load faster over a network optimizes the search engine in that less time is taken to find the searched information (Miller, 2016). Additionally, mobile app technology has played a role in optimizing search engines by making it possible to search for information through the phone instead of the browser.

How Mashups Create New Benefits and Functionality from Existing Data

Mashups build first-hand functionality and benefits by merging, mixing and transforming information from already prevailing data to develop a new collection of valuable functionality. The process involves combining structured data from secure sources such as databases and legal applications with unstructured data from the web (Bouchard, 2009). The mashups facilitate fast prototyping and development of applications by improving on policy security, scalability, access control while on the other hand, reducing development time and associated costs.

Bouchard, S. (2009). Delivering Business Value with Mashups. Network World. https://www.networkworld.com/article/2236503/delivering-business-value-with-mashups.html

Marsden, S. (2018, May 17). How Do Search Engine Crawlers Work? -DeepCrawl. DeepCrawl. https://www.deepcrawl.com/knowledge/technical-seo-library/search-engine-crawling/

Miller, M. (2016, December 27). SEO in 2017: Mobile Optimization As a Competitive Advantage. Search Engine Land. https://searchengineland.com/seo-2017-mobile-optimisation-competitive-advantage-265760

Thornton, D. (2018, March 9). Web Crawlers: How A Web Crawler Works - Back To The Basics. Website Review Tool & SEO Checker. https://www.woorank.com/en/blog/how-a-crawler-works-back-to-the-basics