Many-to-Many Environment

The many-to-many environment, as shown in Figure 25-3, is the classic multiwebbot configuration that all search engines use.

A many-to-many geometry

Figure 25-3. A many-to-many geometry

In the many-to-many environment, a team of webbots harvests data from several target websites. The team is comprised of multiple instances of the webbot script working in a managed environment to achieve a common goal. This is essentially how to scale a one-to-many environment. You simply apply additional webbot resources as the number of targets grows. Since you’re gathering information from multiple targets, issues relating to overusing a single source don’t apply. Once you understand how to manage multiple instances of a webbot script, scaling is a simple matter of creating more instances of that script.