Something that moves slowly along a surface by crawling, or a program that automatically searches the internet for information (like Google's web crawler).
From Old Norse 'krafl' or similar Germanic roots meaning 'to creep.' The modern tech sense emerged in the 1990s with internet search engines that 'crawled' across web pages.
Google's 'web crawlers' were inspired by the image of insects crawling across surfaces, and these digital spiders now visit billions of pages every single day—basically becoming the mapping system of human knowledge.
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