What is the meaning of crawling and indexing?

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   mayank147posted 11 years ago

   What is the meaning of crawling and indexing?

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   NateB11posted 11 years ago

   Google has software that looks at what is searched for in their search engine and looks at what you wrote in your content, matches them up or not, and puts it in an index (or not) in their search engine.

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      vocalcoachposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      Nate - I, too have wondered about this.  You have clarified this question for me and I thank you.

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      NateB11posted 11 years agoin reply to this

      No problem, vocalcoach. I'm glad it helped.

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   Greekgeekposted 11 years ago

   The way search engines find things is that they send out little automated computer programs, called "bots," that simulate someone browsing the web.
   
   Every time a bot encounters a link, it follows it to see where it leads. In that way it finds new pages. (And that's why posting on a big site like Hubpages ensures new content will be found quickly; Hubpages, to a bot, is a complex web of links). Navigating links to find new pages is called CRAWLING, because another early web term for these bots was "spiders" which "crawled" the web.
   
   When a bot encounters a new page, normally, it sits down and examines the whole page, collecting all the text and data it can read off the page and sending that back to the search engine's data center. That means the page is INDEXED. Each search engine then checks all the pages it's indexed, and performs complex calculations to decide which pages are the most relevant for each search query.
   
   As you can imagine, all this is only possible because computers are now incredibly fast and have a lot of storage.
   
   If you don't want a search engine crawling your website, you can embed a hidden "noindex" code on your site to tell it not to index particular pages, or even the whole site. Since Google upranks/downranks Hubpages as a whole depending on the quality of the content its bots discover on the site, Hubpages has implemented the "Quality Assessment Process" so that newly-published hubs are initially set "noindex," then that tag is removed when human quality assessors have had a chance to check a hub and make sure it's not too spotty in terms of content and writing quality.

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      Dr. Haddoxposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      Greekgeek, I like your explanation on this question. Actually, I recommend that you consider making it a hub. You could do a short hub, easily, by adding just a few more sentences to this composition. This is good writing. regards, Dr. Haddox

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      loveofnightposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      I am in agreement with you Dr. Haddox

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   gpishevposted 11 years ago

   Crawling is the process of reviewing you content by google "spiders"/programs/ , this way google analyze it and match it to the search queries. The later process is indexing and ranking it among the other results. Indexing also refers to the time when a page or a website shows in google search engines.

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   jhendorposted 11 years ago

   As far as i know, crawling is the act of a search engine robot scanning through internet webpages to pick and store all information of the website.
   Indexing is the act of storing the webpages that have been crawl in a storage.

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   Dr. Haddoxposted 11 years ago

   Greekgeek has given us a very good answer to this question. This is not to say that our other fellow hubbers do not deserve to be commended on their responses. I am saying, only, that I found Greekgeek's work to be a really great learning experience for me. Regards, Dr. Haddox

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   shielamaeparrenoposted 11 years ago

   I believe it's how Google looks at things posted on the web. Sort of their way of auditing whether your work is worth it or not. Just my thoughts.

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   BonnieHallposted 11 years ago

   I'm no expert nor am I so tech literate but here's how I understand these terms... 
   
   Crawling is the process of searching the internet with a bot to find websites and information that is not automatically visible...  indexing is a way of organizing the information from the crawl...  see this site for more detail
   
   http://www.google.com/intl/en_us/inside … exing.html

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