How Does Web Crawler Work? What is its Function?

Sagara Technology Idea Lab
2 min readAug 20, 2021

Have you ever wondered, why a website can appear on a search engine page??, what makes that happen?, the answer is Web Crawler.

What is a Web Crawler?

A web crawler is a tool for indexing and downloading content from the internet, then it is stored in search engine databases.

So that when someone is looking for information, the search engine will immediately display relevant results from the database.

Web Crawler Functions

A web crawler is a tool that functions to perform crawling and indexing. Well, if IAR does not index your website, then your website will not appear in search results. If the website doesn’t even appear in the search results, it’s impossible to get the top position in the search results.

How does web crawlers work?

A website cannot be found by search engines. Search engines have to do crawling and indexing before finally displaying website content on their SERPs. This process is done with the help of tools called web crawlers, web robots, or web spiders.

Basically, it performs the task as the name implies, namely crawling. Web crawlers will find content on various websites to be indexed in search engines.

Then, how does it work?

First, the web crawler will visit a site and the various links contained in that page. However, if your site is relatively new and there are no other links in it, you can ask search engines to visit your site, as quoted from WebFX.

It’s easy. You just need to enter your site’s URL in Google Search Console. Then, the next task of web crawling tools is to log every link they find into their index.

However, you need to note that web crawlers will only collect information from pages that are public, yes. Web crawlers do not log private pages that cannot be accessed. After that, the web crawler will collect various information, such as posts and meta tags. This information will be stored in the search engine index so that it can appear when users search for content with similar keywords.

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Sagara Technology Idea Lab

Sagara is one of the leading software house based in Jakarta. We do digital product development, digital marketing, and workshops. Visit sagaratechnology.com.