Web crawlers are tools that scan websites in order to acquire all of the data related to the website. Then, all of this data can be used to store data in a database. The most common use for crawlers is to create a database for a search engine. However, the database can be used for other methods as well, including marketing.

Crawling The Right URLs

In order to avoid crawling the same URLs thousands of times, crawlers will modify the URL after it has been crawled. This allows for the crawler to skip over URLs that have already been crawled. However, it may be a good idea to periodically crawl websites again to account for changes. A crawler can extract every URL from a website and can then download each webpage from each URL. Links that lead away from the website can be ignored. Then, the links found on the downloaded webpages can be crawled. In order to keep the crawler from constantly crawling links, limits can be placed on how many links would be followed before the crawler would stop. The crawler may be focused on only downloading certain types of files, such as a PDF or a doc.

Determining The Freshness Or Age

Given that pages are constantly changing, a crawler might use an equation in order to determine how fresh a page is or how old it is. Pages are not only updated, but are also deleted. However, it can be helpful to keep a page that has been deleted since the data may still be useful.

Crawling For Marketers

For marketers, crawlers can be beneficial because they can scan the Internet for customer information. For instance, a crawler may search through a social media platform to find customer comments about a product in order to understand the sentient that customers have toward this product. This data can be quantified so that a company can understand the attitudes toward its product. For instance, you may create a chart tracking the positive vs. negative comments for various products in order to determine which products may have a bad public image.

If you would like to use web crawlers and other data science software programs, Such as from DiscoverText, it is recommended that you find a data science software vendor who specializes in marketing. Crawlers can be used in combination with other data science software tools in order to gather data on customers.