Web crawler FAQ

Crawling HTTP/HTTPS websites

Includes support for both publicly-accessible and private/intranet web sites. Self-signed SSL certificates and custom Certificate Authorities are supported.

Robots "nofollow" support

Includes robots meta tags set to "nofollow" and links with rel="nofollow" attributes.

Robots.txt support

The web crawler honors directives within robots.txt files.

Sitemap support

The web crawler honors XML sitemaps, and fetches sitemaps identified within robots.txt files. Additional sitemaps can also be managed on the domain through the domain dashboard.

Configurable content extraction

The web crawler will extract a predefined, set of fields (url, body content, etc) from each page it visits. In addition to this, the crawler also supports extracting dynamic fields from meta tags.

"Entry points"

Entry points allow customers to specify where the web crawler begins crawling each domain.

"Crawl rules"

Crawl rules allow customers to control whether each URL the web crawler encounters will be visited and indexed.

Logging of each crawl

Logs are representative of an entire crawl, which encompasses all domains in an engine.

Automatic crawling

Configure the cadence for new crawls to start automatically if there isn’t an active crawl.

User interfaces and APIs for managing domains, entry points, and crawl rules

Crawler configuration can be managed via App Search dashboard UIs or via a set of public APIs provided by the product.

Crawl persistence

Crawler uses Elasticsearch to maintain its state during an active crawl, allowing crawls to be migrated between instances in case of an instance failure or a restart of an Enterprise Search instance running a crawl. Each unique URL is only visited once thanks to the Seen URLs list persisted in Elasticsearch. Crawl-specific indexes are automatically cleaned up after a crawl is finished.

Crawling websites behind authentication

The web crawler can crawl content protected by HTTP authentication or content sitting behind an HTTP proxy (with or without authentication). See the following references:

Single-page app (SPA) support

The crawler cannot currently crawl pages that are pure JavaScript single-page apps. We recommend looking at dynamic rendering to help your crawler properly index your JavaScript websites.