INF 141: Information Retrieval Discussion Session Week 3 – Winter 2010 TA: Sara Javanmardi

Open Source Web Crawlers

Heritrix Extensible, Web-Scale, Distributed Internet Archive’s Crawler

Internet Archive dedicated to building and maintaining a free and openly accessible online digital library, including an archive of the Web. http://www.archive.org/

Nutch Apache’s Open Source Search Engine Distributed Tested with 100M Pages

WebSphinx 1998-2002 Single Machine Lots of Problems (Memory leaks, …) Reported to be very slow

Crawler4j Single Machine Should Easily Scale to 20M Pages Very Fast Crawled and Processed the whole English Wikipedia in 10 hours.

Architecture Should be Extremely Fast, otherwise it would be a bottleneck

Docid Server Key-value pairs are stored in a B+-tree data structure. Berkeley DB as the storage engine

Berkeley DB Unlike traditional database systems like MySQL and others, Berkeley DB comes in form of a jar file which is linked to the Java program and runs in the process space of the crawlers. No need for inter-process communication and waiting for context switch between processes. You can think of it as a large HashMap: Key Value

Adding a URL to Frontier public static synchronized int getDocID(String URL) { if there is any key-value pair for key = URL return value else docID= lastdocid+1 put (URL, docID) in storage return -docID } We add the URL to the frontier put (docID,URL) in URL - Queue

Things to Know: Crawler4j only handles duplicate detection in the level of URLs, not in the level of the content. Frontier can be implemented as Priority Queue .

Why Priority Queue? Politeness: do not hit a web server too frequently Freshness: crawl some pages more often than others E.g., pages (such as News sites) whose content changes often

Assigning Priority Prioritizer assigns to URL an integer priority between 1 and K Heuristics for assigning priority Refresh rate sampled from previous crawls Application-specific (e.g., “crawl news sites more often”)

Assignment 3: Crawling digg.com

Assignment 3 Programming Part You can do the assignment 3 in groups of 1, 2 or 3. Tiffany Siu James Milewski , Matt Fritz Kevin Boomhouwer Azia Foster James Rose , Sean Tsusaki , Jeff Gaskill Tzu Yang Huang Fiel Guhit ,Sarah Lee Rob Duncan, Ben Kahn, Dan Morgan Qi Zhu (Chess), Zhuomin Wu Lucy Luxiao, Melanie Sun, Norik Davtian Alex Kaiser, Sam Kaufman Nery Chapeton Jason Gahagan Melanie Cheung, Anthony Liu Chad Curtis , Derek Lee, Rakesh Rajput Andrew J. Santa Maria Zack Pelz

Crawling One Digg Category http://digg.com/arts_culture http://digg.com/autos http://digg.com/educational http://digg.com/food_drink http://digg.com/health http://digg.com/travel_places http://digg.com/arts_culture/popular/365days http://digg.com/arts_culture/popular/30days … Initial Seeds

digg.com/robots.txt User-agent: * Disallow: /aboutpost Disallow: /addfriends Disallow: /addim Disallow: /addlink Disallow: /ajax Disallow: /api Disallow: /captcha Disallow: /css/remote-skins/ Disallow: /deleteuserim Disallow: /deleteuserlink Disallow: /diginfull ... … User-agent: Referrer Karma/2.0 Disallow: /

Things To Do Download the jar file and import it. Download the dependency libraries and import them. Download Crawler4j-example-simple.zip and complete the source code to crawl digg.com

Extra Credit Question 1) Extract story id from digg page: <div  class="news-body"id="18765384"> 2) Send to API: http://services.digg.com/1.0/endpoint?method=story.getDiggs&story_id=18765384&count=100&offset=0

Questions?