What is the difference between Spiders, Robots and Crawlers?

[Patelsharp]

What is the difference between Spiders, Robots and Crawlers.

[Mohit Rana]

Spiders, robots, and crawlers are terms often used interchangeably, but they have specific meanings in the context of web technology:

1. Spiders: Spiders, also known as web crawlers or web spiders, are automated programs or scripts used by search engines to systematically browse the internet, indexing web pages and collecting information about them. These spiders follow links from one web page to another, retrieving and analyzing content to determine its relevance and importance. The data collected by spiders is then used by search engines to generate search results.
2. Robots: Robots, also referred to as bots, are a broader category of automated programs that perform various tasks on the internet. While web crawlers are a type of robot specialized in indexing web content, other types of robots perform different functions, such as interacting with users (chatbots), monitoring websites for changes, scraping data, or performing repetitive tasks.
3. Crawlers: Crawlers are essentially the same as spiders - they are automated programs that systematically browse the web, indexing web pages for search engines. The term "crawler" is often used interchangeably with "spider" to describe these programs.