Grokking the System Design Interview
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Designing a Web Crawler
Let's design a Web Crawler that will systematically browse and download the World Wide Web. Web crawlers are also known as web spiders, robots, worms, walkers, and bots. Difficulty Level: Hard

1. What is a Web Crawler?

A web crawler is a software program that browses the World Wide Web in a methodical and automated manner. It collects documents by recursively fetching links from a set of starting pages. Many sites, particularly search engines, use web crawling as a means of providing up-to-date data. Search engines download all the pages to create an index on them to perform faster searches.

Some other uses of web crawlers are:

  • To test web pages and links for valid syntax and structure.
  • To monitor sites to see when their structure or contents change.

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