Search engine scraping Search engine scraping Search engine scraping is the process of harvesting URLs, descriptions, or other information from search engines such as Google, Bing or Yahoo. This is a specific form of screen scraping or web scraping dedicated to search engines only. Most commonly larger search engine optimization (SEO) providers depend on regularly scraping keywords from search engines, especially Google, to monitor the competitive position of their customers' websites for relevant keywords or their indexing status. Search engines like Google do not allow any sort of automated access to their service but from a legal point of view there is no
Search engine technology is determined by the administrators of the search engine. Human-powered search engines rely on humans to submit information that is subsequently indexed and catalogued. Only information that is submitted is put into the index. In both cases, when you query a search engine to locate information, you're actually searching through the index that the search engine has created —you are not actually searching the Web. These indices are giant databases of information that is collected and stored and subsequently searched. This explains why sometimes a search on a commercial search engine, such as Yahoo! or Google, will return results that