A Web crawler is an Internet bot which systematically browses the World Wide Web, typically for the purpose of Web indexing (web spidering).
Web search engines and some other sites use Web crawling or spidering software to update their web content or indices of others sites' web content. Web crawlers can copy all the pages they visit for later processing by a search engine which indexes the downloaded pages so the users can search much more efficiently.
Crawlers consume resources on the systems they visit and often visit sites without tacit approval. Issues of schedule, load, and "politeness" come into play when large collections of pages are accessed. Mechanisms exist for public sites not wishing to be crawled to make this known to the crawling agent. For instance, including a robots.txt file can request bots to index only parts of a website, or nothing at all.
As the number of pages on the internet is extremely large, even the largest crawlers fall short of making a complete index. For that reason search engines were bad at giving relevant search results in the early years of the World Wide Web, before the year 2000. This is improved greatly by modern search engines, nowadays very good results are given instantly.
Crawlers can validate hyperlinks and HTML code. They can also be used for web scraping (see also data-driven programming).
