Semalt Islamabad Expert: Top 10 Most Popular Web Crawlers And Bots
There are two types of bots on the internet, which are called as good bots and bad bots. You should take serious measures against the bad bots as they can consume the DDN bandwidth in no time. Besides, the negative or bad bots steal your web content and take up the server resources. On the other hand, the good bots (also called as web crawlers) should be handled carefully as they help index your website in the search engine results, such as Bing, Google, and Yahoo.
Michael Brown, a leading expert from Semalt, assures that there are hundreds to thousands of bots and web crawlers scouring the internet, but the following ones are most popular.
1. GoogleBot
The Googlebot is one of the best and most famous web crawlers to date. It is widely used for indexing web content and articles for Google's search results. The best feature of Googlebot is that it provides the users with lots of tools and options. More specifically, Googlebot tells Google which pages are to be indexed and which ones should be left behind.
2. Bingbot
Just like Googlebot, the Bingbot is a popular web crawler by Microsoft. It has been around for years and is meant to index websites in the Bing search results. Bingbot is an ideal replacement for the MSN bot. Its most prominent option is called as Fetch as Bingbot, which is present in the Bing Webmaster Tools. This option lets you request pages to be indexed and shown in the Bing results.
3. Slurp Bot
The Slurp Bot is Yahoo's web crawler but is powered by Bing. Websites should let Yahoo Slurp access their pages for appearing in the Yahoo Mobile Search results. This web crawler is used to collect content from the partner websites for inclusion in Yahoo News, Yahoo Sports and Yahoo Finance.
4. DuckDuckBot
The DuckDuckBot is the famous and best web crawler of DuckDuckGo. This search engine is known for its privacy and does not track a user without his permission. On an average, it handles ten million queries every day. The DuckDuckGo gets the results from more than 400 sources, including several vertical sources that deliver answers related to Instant Answers, Wikipedia and DuckDuckBot. It also handles queries that come from sources like Yandex, Bing, and Yahoo.
5. Baiduspider
The Baiduspider is an official name of a Chinese search engine's web crawler or spider. It can index a lot of web pages every day and returns the updates to its Baidu index. The Baidu is one of the leading Chinese search engines. It has more than eighty percent shares of the overall search markets of China Mainland.
6. Yandex Bot
The YandexBot is a particular web crawler of a Russian search engine, Yandex. Media outlets claim that this bot generated over 57% of all search engine traffic in Russia during 2015.
7. Sogou Spider
The Sogou Spider is a famous web crawler of Sogou.com. This leading Chinese search engine was launched in 2004 and has a rank of 103 on Alexa. You should bear in mind that the Sogou web spider never respects the robot.txt internet standards and is banned from various sites due to its excessive crawling.
8. Exabot
This web crawler is operated by Exalead, a French search engine. It was founded a few years ago and has over sixteen billion web pages indexed in its search results.
9. Facebook External Hit
The social media giant, Facebook, lets its users share interesting links with other Facebook users. The Facebook External Hit performs a variety of functions, including the display of several images, some exciting videos, and a few web pages. One of the main and famous crawling bots is Facebot that helps improve the advertising performance.
10. Alexa Crawler
Alexa Crawler is operated by Amazon's Alexa and is used to index dozens of web pages. It collects information about the websites and ranks them based on local and international preferences.
Final Note
There are various web crawlers and bots, so when you block some suspicious website, make sure you don't block the good bots that index your web pages in the search engine results.