Spider - technical definition

An automated program that reads Web pages from a Website and then follows the hypertext (HTTP) links to other pages. Spammers use spiders to sift through Web pages to look for (that is, harvest) email addresses.

See Also: Bot or Robot; Electronic Mail or Email; HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol); Spammers.

See Spider in Computer


(1) (Spider) A gaming platform from AMD. See Phenom.

(2) Also known as a "crawler," "robot" (bot) and "intelligent agent," a spider is a program that searches for information on the Web. Spiders are widely used by Web search engines to index all the pages on a site by following the links from page to page. The search engine summarizes the content and adds the links to their indexes. Spiders are also used to locate Web pages that sell a particular product or to find blogs that have opinions about a product. See spidering program and surface Web.



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