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I S P  G L O S S A R Y
Your source for the most up-to-date terms, definitions, and acronyms for and about internet service providers.

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spider
Last modified: Wednesday, March 03, 2004 

A program that automatically fetches Web pages. Spiders are used to feed pages to search engines. It's called a spider because it crawls over the Web. Another term for these programs is webcrawler.

Because most Web pages contain links to other pages, a spider can start almost anywhere. As soon as it sees a link to another page, it goes off and fetches it. Large search engines, like Alta Vista, have many spiders working in parallel.

Also see How Web Search Engines Work in the Did You Know . . . ? section of Webopedia.

  Related Links

Making Your Pages Easy for Search Engines to Index 
Achieving high rankings for Web sites on search engines has become a black art. An article from the Web Developer's Virtual Library.

Invite Search Engine Spiders Into Your Dynamic Web Site
Increase the traffic to your dynamic site by making your valuable content visible to search engine spiders.

LiveLink Spider home page
Describes LiveLink Spider, the crawler software used in the Open Text Index, available from Open Text Corporation.

Optimization for Dynamic Web Sites
With just a few quick selections by the user visiting your site, a page can be generated on the fly based on nothing more than the user's specific interest or request.

Yahoo!'s web searching robots and spiders page
Yahoo!'s directory of web searching robots and spiders.

Related Categories

Search Engines

World Wide Web

Related Terms

Alta Vista

cloaking

dynamic URL

link farming

pagejacking

query string

robot

search engine

SEO

SERP

site map

spider trap

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