When you go to a search engine and perform a search many people don’t understand how those results end up there. Some people may think that sites are submitted while others know that a piece of software finds the pages. This article explains one piece of that puzzle: The search engine crawler.
Create a search engine for your website
What is Search Engine Crawling?
Crawling is the process used by search engine web crawlers (bots or spiders) to visit and download a page and extract its links in order to discover additional pages.
Pages known to the search engine are crawled periodically to determine whether any changes have been made to the page’s content since the last time it was crawled. If a search engine detects changes to a page after crawling a page, it will update its index in response to these detected changes.
How to build a crawler search engine
Building a search engine from scratch is not easy. To get you started, you can take a look at existing open source projects like Solr or Elasticsearch. Coming to just the crawler, you can take a look at Nutch. Solr doesn’t come with a built-in crawler but works well with Nutch.
However, there is an easier way to build a crawler search engine for your website. This does not involve any coding and can be done in less than 5 minutes.
Here we will visit the steps required to add the ExpertRec crawler search engine to your website. This is one of the easiest setup processes of all the available options out there and is highly recommended.
- Navigate to https://cse.expertrec.com/newuser?platform=cse and signup with your Google ID.
- Enter your website’s URL when prompted. You can select a server location near you and add the URL of your sitemap if you wish to. These will be auto-detected otherwise.
- You can play around with the settings and customize the UI as the crawl runs. Once it is complete, you can check out a fully functional demo before taking the search to your website.
- You can take the search to your website with little to no effort. All you need to do is to paste the code snippet available on the dashboard on your website.
ExpertRec crawler search engine comes with more customization options that you can explore. You can read this article to find a more detailed guide on the installation and configuration.
