How Does Google Build Its Web Scrapers? – Semalt Answer

Web scraping has become an indispensable activity in every organization because of its numerous benefits. While virtually every company benefits from it, the most significant beneficiary of web scraping is Google.

Google's web scraping tools can be grouped into 3 major categories, and they are:

1. Google Crawlers

Google crawlers are also known as Google bots. They are used for scraping the content of every page on the web. There are billions of web pages on the web, and hundreds are being hosted every minute, so Google bots have to crawl all web pages as fast as possible.

These bots run on certain algorithms to determine the sites to crawl and the web pages to scrape. They begin from a list of URLs that have been generated from previous crawling processes. According to their algorithms, these bots detect the links on each page as they crawl and add the links to the list of pages to be crawled. While crawling the web, they take note of new sites and updated ones.

To correct a common misconception, Google bots do not have the ability to rank websites. That is the function of Google index. Bots are only concerned with accessing web pages within the shortest possible timeline. At the end of their crawling processes, Google bots transfer all the content gathered from web pages to Google index.

2. Google Index

Google index receives all the scraped content from Google bots and uses it to rank the web pages that have been scraped. Google index carries out this function based on its algorithm. As mentioned earlier, Google index ranks websites and sends the ranks to search result servers. Websites with higher ranks for a particular niche appear first in search result pages within that niche. It is as simple as that.

3. Google Search Result Servers

When a user searches for certain keywords, the most relevant web pages are served or returned in the order of their relevance. Although rank is used to determine the relevancy of a website to searched keywords, it is not the only factor used in determining relevancy. There are other factors used to determine the relevancy of web pages.

Each of the links on a page from other sites boosts the rank and relevancy of the page. However, all links are not equal. The most valuable links are the ones received because of the quality of the page content.

Before now, the number of times a certain keyword appeared on a web page used to boost the rank of the page. However, it no longer does. What now matters to Google is the quality of the content. Content is meant to be read, and readers are only attracted by the quality of content and not numerous keyword appearance. So, the most relevant page for each query must have the highest rank and appear first on the results of that query. If not, Google will lose its credibility.

In conclusion, one important fact to take away from this article is that without web scraping, Google and other search engines will return no result.