How to Build a Scalable Web Crawler With Smart Scheduling and Deduplication
Scaling a web crawler requires managing a priority-based URL frontier that filters scope, controls freshness, and avoids hammering the same sections repeatedly. Politeness policies — including per-host request delays, exponential backoff on errors, and conditional fetches — are essential to avoid IP bans. Content deduplication through canonical URL detection and normalized hashing should happen before storage to keep datasets clean and noise-free. Incremental re-crawling using a manifest of last-fetched times and content hashes reduces costs by only revisiting pages that have likely changed. A three-layer storage model — raw HTML in object storage, extracted content in a queryable database, and derived artifacts in purpose-built stores — keeps the pipeline idempotent and trustworthy at scale.
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