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Being a Data as a Service provider, our crawler bots have been to the nooks and corners of the internet looking for insightful data. We have gained deep domain knowledge along the years and have been upgrading our pipeline constantly to make our crawling faster and efficient. This post is meant for clearing the unsettled doubts of some of our prospective clients as we keep getting requirements that are technically not feasible for a web crawling solution like ours, or even Google, for that matter.
Although we are a web crawling company and web crawlers are also the backbone of the search engine giant – Google, there are some key differences to be noted.
Here’s how PromptCloud’s crawling is different from what Google offers.
1. We don’t crawl the whole web
We often receive requirements that demand crawling the entire web, indexing all the data and extracting only the needed data after querying. This is something that would require a gigantic infrastructure and not to mention, the cost of such a setup will surpass the value you may be able to derive from the data. It’s just not efficient or feasible, unless Google Offers agrees to be your web data extraction provider. Google, with their enormous web crawling infrastructure and dedicated data centers, can crawl a significant portion of the surface web. We, as an enterprise-grade data provider, won’t be able to do mass crawls where the entire web is to be crawled and indexed. However, we do have a mass scale crawl offering which has been explained in the next section.
How our mass scale crawls work:
If you wish to extract data from a large number of sources, but with limited attention to record-level-details, our mass scale crawls solution will be an ideal fit for you. This solution is especially useful if you are looking to crawl hundreds of thousands of blogs, news sites or forums to extract data points like URL, date, author name and the content. Mass scale crawls will provide you this data in a structured format as continuous feeds. However, this still doesn’t cover the entire web and the crawl is done on a predefined set of sites that follow similar schema for the data presented on them.
2. We cannot fetch you the website stats
There have been requirements where the leads wanted us to fetch the traffic stats of some websites. This is not feasible, not just for us but even for Google. Google Offers only has the traffic stats of websites that use the Google analytics suite. Otherwise, it’s practically impossible to get backend data from websites since it’s not made available to third parties. If you are looking for competitors’ SEO data, we recommend you use popular tools like Moz, Semrush and Ahrefs.
3. We can index data, but it’s different from how Google does it
Google has a gigantic index of webpages that it regularly crawls. The indexed data is made available to the end users to search using free text. It has a well evolved algorithm that ranks webpages on the search result pages according to their relevancy to the user’s search query. Our hosted indexing offering can only be used if you who have the technical acumen to make API calls to query the data.
The hosted indexing solution is meant for those who don’t want to deal with storing the data but want to query it as and when required. We host and index the data for you, so that you can make API calls.
Those were some of the key differences between PromptCloud and Google, despite working on web crawling as the base technology.
