This is a survey of the science and practice of web crawling. While at first glance web crawling may appear to be merely an application of breadth-first-search, the truth is that there are many challenges ranging from systems concerns such as managing very large data structures, to theoretical questions such as how often to revisit evolving content sources.

This survey outlines the fundamental challenges and describes the state-of-the-art models and solutions. It also highlights avenues for future work.