URL spiders made the Internet that we know today. There was a time when Internet users were dependent on links from other websites. With search engines like Google, we no longer have to depend on the time and resources of a single website to point us in the right direction. Internet spiders such as GoogleBoy paved the way for the creation of niche URL spider softwares or scripts. Whether you need a desktop URL spider or an online URL spider , the choices are there for the fledgling Internet marketer. Despite all of these URL spiders, search engine spiders will always be the standard de factor when it comes to retrieving relevant search results.

About 4 years ago people were surfing the Internet using a handful of resourceful websites. Webmasters would act more or less like a human URL spider. They would "crawled" other webmaster's websites and find relevant information. After they reviewed the information on these websites, they would come back to their own website and put a direct link back to the website they visited.

This manual process of collecting links lead to the launch of familar websites such as Yahoo. In fact, Yahoo is still unique because they are still using humans to review submitted links from other webmasters. The process is still long and tedious, but it works. Internet users are getting more relevant information from Yahoo because Yahoo depends heavily on backfills from Google and Inktomi.