If you are in IT field or in the digital marketing stuff, I am sure you must have heard of web crawling. At least in terms of how Google crawl each website and show them in the search result. Although you can create your own web crawler as well but to make it on the standard used in the industry, you should add certain features.
Or the best way is to get the web crawling done from the companies like Facstar which will manage all your crawling and data in a go. These data can help you in many ways like it will help you to take some data driven business decision, while from digital marketing side, it may help you with the search engine optimization as well.
For example, if you are looking for something like web crawler Toronto, you can grab the data from website ranking and check what they are doing and how much effort you should make.
If you are a web developer and developing some kind of web crawler or if you are user looking for some great web crawler then you should definitely check for the following features in a tool.
The universal rule to a good web crawler is, don’t overload the source server else their admins might blacklist your IP and later on you won’t be able to get on it.
#1 Support for resuming the operation
This feature will be extremely useful when you are crawling the big website and due to server overload your IP become blacklisted for some time. In this case, when enabled you can come back and start from those pages which have not been crawled.
#2 Proxy Support
A proxy support will be again needed when you are building something for enterprise level. It should have an option to connect to the proxy and scrap the content of the website. Usually, what happens, in some locations some specific websites are not accessible and so in such cases, using proxy those websites are getting accessed.
#3 JavaScript based page rendering
Most of the web pages are powered by the JavaScript nowadays and so your web crawler should be able to crawl the website once these JavaScript files and codes are getting executed.
#4 Distributed Crawling
Again, this can be one of the enterprise level feature where while crawling the big websites, the web crawler can be distributed across the multiple systems with different IP addresses so that load can be distributed. This will help in managing the load and speeding up the process.
#5 Should deal with broken page
Usually, what happens while crawling the web, if some broken pages come, the loop is getting vanished and the data extraction process gets broken. Or at least limit the data. And so, your professional web crawling tool should be in such a way that, it should handle all such issue and can be one of the ideal solution.
In a nutshell
These were the 5 most important and most basic as well features a web crawler tool must have. If you are building any such tool, you should incorporate these features or if you are looking for such tool, you should definitely check these features before buying.
What else you look for in a good web crawler?