Wanderer

A wanderer is an autonomous Web agent, a Web-wandering robot that collects information on its travels. The wanderer retrieves a document and then retrieves all the documents it references until the entire Web is traversed. Wanderers differ from spiders in that spiders create a database of Weblinks, whereas a wanderer's aim is to measure the growth of the WWW.

The Wanderer was designed by Matthew Gray. Up and running in the spring of 1993, it was the first automated Web agent or "spider. It traversed the Web on a monthly basis from June 1993 to June 1995.

URLs:

Wanderer

This site has information from the first wanderer and a brief history of it.

List of Robots

This site has a list of all active web wanderers.

W3E References:

robot

spider

Print References:

• the World Wide Web Unleashed by John December and Neil Randall. Sams Publishing, Indianapolis, IN. 1995. (ISBN: 0-6723-0737-5)