MarginaliaSearch/code/processes/crawling-process
Viktor Lofgren 734996002c (*) install script for deploying Marginalia outside the codebase
The changeset also makes the control service responsible for flyway migrations.  This helps reduce the number of places the database configuration needs to be spread out.  These automatic migrations can be disabled with -DdisableFlyway=true.

The commit also adds curl to the docker container, to enable docker health checks and interdependencies.
2024-01-11 12:40:03 +01:00
..
src (*) install script for deploying Marginalia outside the codebase 2024-01-11 12:40:03 +01:00
build.gradle (crawler) Switch hash function in crawler 2023-12-27 13:29:00 +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