A Web crawler starts with a list of URLs to visit, called the seeds. As the crawler visits these URLs, it identifies all the hyperlinks in the page and adds them to the list of URLs to visit, called the crawl frontier. URLs from the frontier are recursively visited according to a set of policies. If the crawler is performing archiving of websites it copies and saves the information as it goes. The archives are usually stored in such a way they can be viewed, read and navigated as they were on the live web, but are preserved as ‘snapshots’.

The archive is known as the repository and is designed to store and manage the collection of web pages. The repository only stores HTML pages and these pages are stored as distinct files.

A repository is similar to any other system that stores data, like a modern-day database. The only difference is that a repository does not need all the functionality offered by a database system. The repository stores the most recent version of the web page retrieved by the crawler.

The large volume implies the crawler can only download a limited number of the Web pages within a given time, so it needs to prioritize its downloads. The high rate of change can imply the pages might have already been updated or even deleted.

The number of possible URLs crawled being generated by server-side software has also made it difficult for web crawlers to avoid retrieving duplicate content.

Endless combinations of HTTP GET (URL-based) parameters exist, of which only a small selection will actually return unique content.