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
Web search engine located on public anonymous FTP (File Transfer Protocol) sites, creating a searchable database of file names; however, Archie Search Engine did not index the contents of these sites since the amount of data was so limited it could be readily searched manually. The rise of Gopher (created in 1991 by Mark McCahill at the University of Minnesota) led to two new search programs, Veronica and Jughead. Like Archie, they searched the file names and titles stored in Gopher index systems. Veronica ("V"ery "E"asy "R"odent-"O"riented "N"et-wide "I"ndex to "C"omputerized "A"rchives) provided a keyword search of most Gopher menu titles in the