diff --git a/docs/index.rst b/docs/index.rst
index 0a96aa88e..cedde8f38 100644
--- a/docs/index.rst
+++ b/docs/index.rst
@@ -4,7 +4,13 @@
 Scrapy |version| documentation
 ==============================
 
-This documentation contains everything you need to know about Scrapy.
+Scrapy is a fast high-level `web crawling`_ and `web scraping`_ framework, used
+to crawl websites and extract structured data from their pages. It can be used
+for a wide range of purposes, from data mining to monitoring and automated
+testing.
+
+.. _web crawling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_crawler
+.. _web scraping: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping
 
 Getting help
 ============