Automated Web Crawlers & Directed Graph Traversal

At the foundation of any search engine is the web crawler (such as Googlebot or Bingbot). The web is mathematically modeled as a directed graph G=(V,E), where vertices V are URLs and edges E are hyperlinks. Using a frontier priority queue, the crawler fetches HTML documents, extracts outgoing hyperlinks (href attributes), and schedules newly discovered URLs for crawling.