Googlebot is a web crawling software used by Google, which is designed to systematically browse the internet to collect information about web pages and add them to Google’s searchable index. When a user enters a query into the Google search engine, the results that appear are largely based on the information gathered by Googlebot. It performs the crucial task of discovering and retrieving web pages, including new content as well as updates to existing pages. Googlebot uses an algorithmic process to determine which sites to crawl, how often, and how many pages to fetch from each site. The crawling process begins with a list of web page URLs generated from previous crawl processes and augmented with sitemap data provided by webmasters. As Googlebot visits each of these websites, it detects links on each page and adds them to its list of pages to crawl. New sites, changes to existing sites, and dead links are noted and used to update the Google index. The Googlebot process is an essential component of the search engine’s functionality, as it ensures that the search engine’s results are up to date and as comprehensive as possible.
