a web spider ⁄ web crawler?
Web spiders or web crawlers (also known as web robots, ants, worms and automatic indexers) are programs or automated scripts that browse the Internet in a methodical, automated manner. They are particularly useful for search engines to keep the search results up–to–date. They can also be used for automating maintenance tasks on a website, such as checking links or validating HTML code. And spammers use them to gather specific types of information such as e–mail addresses from web pages.
