What is a Web Spider?


Working example of a dumb spider:
ASPIDER is a dumb spider that just spiders a given URL and attempts to download any file that matches a given mime type. 

Other examples of dumb spiders being used: 
Google or other search engines for content indexing. These spiders run all over the internet and attempt to "index" the entire internet's available content. They often obey and respect the /robots.txt file.   While Google spiders are highly advanced and can probably do complex pattern matching, they still perform the same function on each page and rank pages based on keywords. 


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