Web wide crawl with initial seedlist and crawler configuration
from March 2011. This uses the new HQ software for distributed crawling
by Kenji Nagahashi.
What’s in the data set:
Crawl start date: 09 March, 2011
Crawl end date: 23 December, 2011
Number of captures: 2,713,676,341
Number of unique URLs: 2,273,840,159
Number of hosts: 29,032,069
The seed list for this crawl was a list of Alexa’s top 1 million web
sites, retrieved close to the crawl start date. We used Heritrix
(3.1.1-SNAPSHOT) crawler software and respected robots.txt directives.
The scope of the crawl was not limited except for a few manually
excluded sites.
However this was a somewhat experimental crawl for us, as we were
using newly minted software to feed URLs to the crawlers, and we know
there were some operational issues with it. For example, in many cases
we may not have crawled all of the embedded and linked objects in a page
since the URLs for these resources were added into queues that quickly
grew bigger than the intended size of the crawl (and therefore we never
got to them). We also included repeated crawls of some Argentinian
government sites, so looking at results by country will be somewhat
skewed.
We have made many changes to how we do these wide crawls since this
particular example, but we wanted to make the data available “warts and
all” for people to experiment with. We have also done some further analysis of the content.
If you would like access to this set of crawl data, please contact us
at info at archive dot org and let us know who you are and what you’re
hoping to do with it. We may not be able to say “yes” to all requests,
since we’re just figuring out whether this is a good idea, but everyone
will be considered.
