A Web crawler is a computer program that browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner. Other terms for Web crawlers are ants, automatic indexers, bots, and worms or Web spider, Web robot, or—especially in the FOAF community—Web scutter. This process is called Web crawling or spidering. Many sites, in particular search engines, use spidering as a means of providing up-to-date data. Web crawlers are mainly used to create a copy of all the visited pages for later processing by a search engine that will index the downloaded pages to provide fast searches. Crawlers can also be used for automating maintenance tasks on a Web site
