Intelligent Web Crawling

Web crawling, a process of collecting web pages in an automated manner, is the primary and ubiquitous operation used by a large number of web systems and agents starting from a simple program for website backup to a major web search engine. Due to an astronomical amount of data already published on the Web and ongoing exponential growth of web content, any party that want to take advantage of massive-scale web data faces a high barrier to entry. We start with background on web crawling and the structure of the Web. We then discuss different crawling strategies and describe adaptive web crawling techniques leading to better overall crawl performance. We finally overview some of the challenges in web crawling by presenting such topics as collaborative web crawling, crawling the deep Web and crawling multimedia content. Our goals are to introduce the intelligent systems community to the challenges in web crawling research, present intelligent web crawling approaches, and engage researchers and practitioners for open issues and research problems. Our presentation could be of interest to web intelligence and intelligent agent technology communities as it particularly focuses on the usage of intelligent/adaptive techniques in the web crawling domain.