MarginaliaSearch/code/processes/crawling-process
Viktor Lofgren 1328bc4938 (warc) Clean up parquet conversion
This commit cleans up the warc->parquet conversion.  Records with a http status other than 200 are now included.

The commit also fixes a bug where the robots.txt parser would be fed the full HTTP response (and choke), instead of the body.

The DocumentBodyExtractor code has also been cleaned up, and now offers a way of just getting the byte[] representation for later processing, as conversion to and from strings is a bit wasteful.
2023-12-14 16:05:48 +01:00
..
src (warc) Clean up parquet conversion 2023-12-14 16:05:48 +01:00
build.gradle Implement Warc-recording wrapper for OkHttp3 client 2023-12-08 13:49:16 +01:00
readme.md (docs) Improve architectural documentation for the crawler. 2023-11-30 21:30:57 +01:00

Crawling Process

The crawling process downloads HTML and saves them into per-domain snapshots. The crawler seeks out HTML documents, and ignores other types of documents, such as PDFs. Crawling is done on a domain-by-domain basis, and the crawler does not follow links to other domains within a single job.

Robots Rules

A significant part of the crawler is dealing with robots.txt and similar, rate limiting headers; especially when these are not served in a standard way (which is very common). RFC9390 as well as Google's Robots.txt Specifications are good references.

Re-crawling

The crawler can use old crawl data to avoid re-downloading documents that have not changed. This is done by comparing the old and new documents using the HTTP If-Modified-Since and If-None-Match headers. If a large proportion of the documents have not changed, the crawler falls into a mode where it only randomly samples a few documents from each domain, to avoid wasting time and resources on domains that have not changed.

Sitemaps and rss-feeds

On top of organic links, the crawler can use sitemaps and rss-feeds to discover new documents.

Central Classes

See Also