What is cloud computing?
Cloud computing may be termed the a la carte delivery of Information technology resources available over the internet with the facility like painting as peruse. Access to technological services like computing power, storage, and databases as and when required from a cloud provider is provided without having to buy, own, and maintain physical data centers and servers.
In the ever-evolving world of technology, the industries and organizations across all sectors have adopted cloud technology with the aim of providing a large variety of uses like backing up data, disaster recovery, virtual desktops, email, developing software, and testing it along with big data analytics and user-facing web applications.
The use of cloud technology has facilitated particular business sectors to meet their consumers’ particular needs and requirements. Examples can be taken from a company that makes games that uses cloud technology to reach out to many players globally. The detection and prevention of fraud by banking sectors have been beneficial by adopting cloud technologies. In the health and medical sector, it has been found that many healthcare organizations are using cloud technologies to provide better-personalized treatments to their patients.
Having understood what cloud computing is, we are left with the query that what the term spider web is in cloud computing.
With respect to the internet, the term spider may be prescribed as a unique software plotted to orderly crawl and browse the world wide web normally having the motive of indexing web pages concerning providing them as search results for user search queries. Googlebot is one of the famous spiders known along with Google’s main crawler, ensuring that significant results are obtained in search queries.
Spiders are also known as Web crawlers and search bots.
Overview of spider web’s functioning
A program designed to collect all the information regarding a specific search from the world wide web is called a spider. The spider goes through the pages of websites securing information and indexing it for further use, generally in cases for search engine results. One can also master this search engine by Opting for Great Learning’s online course for cloud computing
The chief function of the spider is to visit web pages via links to and from the pages, so a page devoid of a single link going to it will be harder to index and may be graded really low on the search result page. If found links are pointing to a page, this would indicate that the page is in demand, and it would appear higher up on the search results.
The steps which are involved in web crawling are as follows :
- After finding a site, a spider starts to crawl its pages.
- Indexing the words and contents on the site is the primary objective of a spider.
- The spider visits all the links available on that site.
The Modus operandi of spiders
The web crawlers or spiders are anything but programs, and, as such, they follow precise rules set by the programmers. The developers of websites can also control this by commanding the spider to which portions of the site to index and which should not. This is executed by developing a “robots.txt” file which contains regulations for the spider concerning which portions to index and links to follow and which ones it should avoid.
There are many spiders available, but the most prominent spiders among them are those owned by major search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo, among those who are meant for data mining and research. Still, there are various malevolent spiders programmed to find and collect emails for the user to sell the advertising firms or to find loopholes in the web security.
In the modern age of ever-developing technology concerning the internet and new websites emerging every second, it is nearly impossible to know how many webpages does the internet has, here with the aid of a web crawler, also known as the spider bots, start from a seed or a list of known URLs. The spiders go through the web pages at those URLs in priority. Going through these web pages, they find the hyperlinks to other URLs, and they add those to the list of pages to crawl next.
The availability of numerous web pages on the internet which could be indexed for search could be never-ending, here the web crawler following a specific pathway programmed makes it more selective about the content which is significant and necessary and avoids the content which is of less prominence, thus speeding the process of future updates and upgrades.
The web crawlers are programmed in a way that they crawl the web pages which are visited frequently or the pages that link to that particular search page and other aspects which denote the page’s probability of containing vital information. The basic concept is that a web page that has a high frequency of visitors has a high prospect of containing high quality, authoritative information, so it is primary that a search engine has it indexed, just like a library which keeps copies of famous in quantity so that it is read by maximum people. As the content on the web is being added, altered, deleted, and moved, the web crawlers need to revisit the pages to provide the latest version of the content searched.
Though different programs use various algorithms to build different spiders or web crawlers, it has been observed that web crawlers from various search engines act quite differently but have a similar and common goal which is to download and index content from web pages.
Why are they called Spiders?
The main part of surfing the internet starts from typing the three magic words, ( www.) which stand for the worldwide web, which is rudimentary to access any site. It was normal to call search engine bots spiders as they crawl all over the web just like the spiders crawl over their spiderwebs.
The spiders have really searched for absolutely anything with regard to everything very simple. They have proved to be highly efficient in terms of searching information available on the internet. You can also learn regarding the same with cloud computing courses online.
