The Search: John Battelle Bursts My Bubble
9:06 pm in Other Search Stuff by Will Fleiss
I’m only a few pages into The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, by John Battelle, and already my world has been turned upside down. Read the following two sentences and tell me your not just a little disappointed:
“It’s seductive to think of crawlers as tiny little robots wandering the vast halls of cyperspace, but the truth is a bit more mundane. Crawlers are in fact homebodies, siting on their own servers and sending out vast numbers of requests to pages on the Internet, much as your browser does.”
On some level I think I always new this, but to not think of search engine spiders as actually crawling from link to link, well…that’s just no fun. Ultimately its important to understand how pages are actually indexed, but I think I’ll always envision Googlebots with 8 little legs, and explain to my clients that search engine spiders crawl the Web drinking link juice and eating good content… How do you explain the inter workings of search engines to the novice client?
