Crawlers, Agents, Bots, Robots and Spiders

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Five terms all describing basically the same thing, but in this article they'll be referred to collectively as spiders or "agents". A search engine spider is an automated software program used to locate and collect data from web pages for inclusion in a search engine's database and to follow links to find new pages on the World Wide Web. The term "agent" is more commonly applied to web browsers and mirroring software.

If you've ever examined your server logs or web site traffic reports, you've probably come across some weird and wonderful names for search engine spiders, including "Fluffy the Spider" and Slurp. Depending upon the type of web traffic reports you receive, you may find spiders listed in the "Agents" section of your statistics.