a search engine, computer software program for locating World Wide Web (WWW) information. WebCrawler was developed by University of Washington graduate student Brian Pinkerton in 1994 but is now maintained by America Online, Inc., a commercial Internet service provider. WebCrawler uses a program called a spider to search the WWW for new documents (called Web pages) and to index all the words in the documents. A person using WebCrawler enters a key word or phrase, and WebCrawler provides a list of all documents that contain the word or phrase. Each title is linked to the document's site on the WWW, so users can go directly from the list to any document on the list.