scispace - formally typeset
Search or ask a question
Topic

Web crawler

About: Web crawler is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 5394 publications have been published within this topic receiving 127627 citations. The topic is also known as: ant & automatic indexer.


Papers
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
01 Apr 1998
TL;DR: This paper provides an in-depth description of Google, a prototype of a large-scale search engine which makes heavy use of the structure present in hypertext and looks at the problem of how to effectively deal with uncontrolled hypertext collections where anyone can publish anything they want.
Abstract: In this paper, we present Google, a prototype of a large-scale search engine which makes heavy use of the structure present in hypertext. Google is designed to crawl and index the Web efficiently and produce much more satisfying search results than existing systems. The prototype with a full text and hyperlink database of at least 24 million pages is available at http://google.stanford.edu/. To engineer a search engine is a challenging task. Search engines index tens to hundreds of millions of web pages involving a comparable number of distinct terms. They answer tens of millions of queries every day. Despite the importance of large-scale search engines on the web, very little academic research has been done on them. Furthermore, due to rapid advance in technology and web proliferation, creating a web search engine today is very different from three years ago. This paper provides an in-depth description of our large-scale web search engine -- the first such detailed public description we know of to date. Apart from the problems of scaling traditional search techniques to data of this magnitude, there are new technical challenges involved with using the additional information present in hypertext to produce better search results. This paper addresses this question of how to build a practical large-scale system which can exploit the additional information present in hypertext. Also we look at the problem of how to effectively deal with uncontrolled hypertext collections where anyone can publish anything they want.

14,696 citations

Proceedings Article
11 Nov 1999
TL;DR: This paper describes PageRank, a mathod for rating Web pages objectively and mechanically, effectively measuring the human interest and attention devoted to them, and shows how to efficiently compute PageRank for large numbers of pages.
Abstract: The importance of a Web page is an inherently subjective matter, which depends on the readers interests, knowledge and attitudes. But there is still much that can be said objectively about the relative importance of Web pages. This paper describes PageRank, a mathod for rating Web pages objectively and mechanically, effectively measuring the human interest and attention devoted to them. We compare PageRank to an idealized random Web surfer. We show how to efficiently compute PageRank for large numbers of pages. And, we show how to apply PageRank to search and to user navigation.

14,400 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The content coverage and practical utility of PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar are compared and PubMed remains an optimal tool in biomedical electronic research.
Abstract: The evolution of the electronic age has led to the development of numerous medical databases on the World Wide Web, offering search facilities on a particular subject and the ability to perform citation analysis. We compared the content coverage and practical utility of PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar. The official Web pages of the databases were used to extract information on the range of journals covered, search facilities and restrictions, and update frequency. We used the example of a keyword search to evaluate the usefulness of these databases in biomedical information retrieval and a specific published article to evaluate their utility in performing citation analysis. All databases were practical in use and offered numerous search facilities. PubMed and Google Scholar are accessed for free. The keyword search with PubMed offers optimal update frequency and includes online early articles; other databases can rate articles by number of citations, as an index of importance. For citation analysis, Scopus offers about 20% more coverage than Web of Science, whereas Google Scholar offers results of inconsistent accuracy. PubMed remains an optimal tool in biomedical electronic research. Scopus covers a wider journal range, of help both in keyword searching and citation analysis, but it is currently limited to recent articles (published after 1995) compared with Web of Science. Google Scholar, as for the Web in general, can help in the retrieval of even the most obscure information but its use is marred by inadequate, less often updated, citation information.

2,696 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
Andrei Z. Broder1
01 Sep 2002
TL;DR: This taxonomy of web searches is explored and how global search engines evolved to deal with web-specific needs is discussed.
Abstract: Classic IR (information retrieval) is inherently predicated on users searching for information, the so-called "information need". But the need behind a web search is often not informational -- it might be navigational (give me the url of the site I want to reach) or transactional (show me sites where I can perform a certain transaction, e.g. shop, download a file, or find a map). We explore this taxonomy of web searches and discuss how global search engines evolved to deal with web-specific needs.

2,094 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
17 May 1999
TL;DR: A new hypertext resource discovery system called a Focused Crawler that is robust against large perturbations in the starting set of URLs, and capable of exploring out and discovering valuable resources that are dozens of links away from the start set, while carefully pruning the millions of pages that may lie within this same radius.
Abstract: The rapid growth of the World-Wide Web poses unprecedented scaling challenges for general-purpose crawlers and search engines In this paper we describe a new hypertext resource discovery system called a Focused Crawler The goal of a focused crawler is to selectively seek out pages that are relevant to a pre-defined set of topics The topics are specified not using keywords, but using exemplary documents Rather than collecting and indexing all accessible Web documents to be able to answer all possible ad-hoc queries, a focused crawler analyzes its crawl boundary to find the links that are likely to be most relevant for the crawl, and avoids irrelevant regions of the Web This leads to significant savings in hardware and network resources, and helps keep the crawl more up-to-date To achieve such goal-directed crawling, we designed two hypertext mining programs that guide our crawler: a classifier that evaluates the relevance of a hypertext document with respect to the focus topics, and a distiller that identifies hypertext nodes that are great access points to many relevant pages within a few links We report on extensive focused-crawling experiments using several topics at different levels of specificity Focused crawling acquires relevant pages steadily while standard crawling quickly loses its way, even though they are started from the same root set Focused crawling is robust against large perturbations in the starting set of URLs It discovers largely overlapping sets of resources in spite of these perturbations It is also capable of exploring out and discovering valuable resources that are dozens of links away from the start set, while carefully pruning the millions of pages that may lie within this same radius Our anecdotes suggest that focused crawling is very effective for building high-quality collections of Web documents on specific topics, using modest desktop hardware © 1999 Published by Elsevier Science BV All rights reserved

1,700 citations


Network Information
Related Topics (5)
Software
130.5K papers, 2M citations
80% related
Wireless sensor network
142K papers, 2.4M citations
79% related
Artificial neural network
207K papers, 4.5M citations
79% related
The Internet
213.2K papers, 3.8M citations
79% related
Information system
107.5K papers, 1.8M citations
79% related
Performance
Metrics
No. of papers in the topic in previous years
YearPapers
2023106
2022309
2021125
2020192
2019296
2018323