The point of it

 

The idea is to build up your own corpus of texts, by downloading web pages with the help of a search engine.

 

What you do

 

Just type a word or phrase and press Go or <Enter>.

 

How it works

 

WebGetter visits the Search Engine specified in the second box and downloads the first 100 sources or so. Basically it uses the Search Engine just as you do yourself, getting a list of useful references. Then it sends out a robot to visit each web address and download the web page in each case (not from the Search Engine's cache but from the original web-site). Quite a few robots may be out there searching for you at once -- the advantage of this is that one slow download doesn't hold all the others up.

 

After downloading a web page, that WebGetter robot checks it meets your requirements (in Settings). If the page is big enough, a file with a name very similar to the web address will be saved to your hard disk.

 

When it runs out of references, WebGetter re-visits the Search Engine and gets some more.

 

See also: Settings, Display, Limitations

Page url: http://www.lexically.net/wordsmith/step_by_step_Chinese/?webgetteroverview.htm