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How To Build a Web Spider On Linux

Posted by kdawson on from the five-eyes dept.

IdaAshley writes, "Web spiders are software agents that traverse the Internet gathering, filtering, and potentially aggregating information for a user. This article shows you how to build spiders and scrapers for Linux to crawl a Web site and gather information, stock data, in this case. Using common scripting languages and their collection of Web modules, you can easily develop Web spiders."

104 comments

  1. Hmm... by joe_cot · · Score: 5, Funny

    Yes, but does it run on ... damn.

    1. Re:Hmm... by martin-boundary · · Score: 1

      ... the internet?

    2. Re:Hmm... by lpcustom · · Score: 1

      Is "evironment" a new buzzword I haven't heard of?

      --
      Beer! It's what's for breakfast!
    3. Re:Hmm... by Fordiman · · Score: 1

      So that's what they're called. I've been building them for years, both for personal data collection and for research for professors I work for (I have a couple of acknowledgements to this effect). I've been calling them 'site scrapers' and 'data reapers'.

      And I generally write 'em in PHP. Makes 'em nice and lightweight to redistribute (php.exe and php5ts.dll are usually all that's needed. Sometimes php_http.dll as well.)

      --
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    4. Re:Hmm... by moro_666 · · Score: 1

      You must have tons of time on your hands for those crawlers ....

        A modern crawler has to overcome very annoying problems like nslookup delays and network lags that are caused by a third party. If you can write it in a threaded environment, good for you, if you can drop the "single scope" at all and go for an select or even better, epolled version that can crawl thousand sites at a time, even better.

        For simple tasks even the ithreads of perl would do. But i'd suggest a language that supports threads natively (for ease of writing perhaps python or ruby ?).

        Ofcourse if you are just crawling one site, a simple php script could do it as well...

      --

      I'd tell you the chances of this story being a dupe, but you wouldn't like it.
    5. Re:Hmm... by strstrep · · Score: 3, Interesting

      PHP lightweight? Ha!

      The PHP interpreter is over 5 megabytes in size. And it isn't thread-safe. That's a lot of memory overhead for a program that's going to be blocking on I/O most of the time, seeing how you'll have to fork() a new process for each new "thread" you want.

      Also, languages like Perl and Python have binaries that are about 1 megabyte in size. Now, while they'll probably need to load in extra files for most practical applications, these extra files are typically small. Most importantly, Perl and Python are thread-safe.

      Perl, for example, includes libraries such as Thread::Queue, which allows you to very easily create a threading model with worker threads, without having to worry too much about condition variables, mutexes, and the like.

      Disclaimer: All measurements done on x86 Debian Linux.

    6. Re:Hmm... by chromatic · · Score: 1

      What do you mean "natively"? Ruby 1.8, at least, doesn't use OS threads. Perl ithreads map to native threads, where they're available.

      --
      how to invest, a novice's guide
    7. Re:Hmm... by try_anything · · Score: 1
      You must have tons of time on your hands for those crawlers ....

      You can make any program difficult hard by increasing the generality and performance requirements, but there's nothing inherently difficult about screen-scraping from a web site. I've written a few scripts to extract data from web sites, and they're quite simple if your aims are modest. The first crawler I wrote was also my first Perl project, my first time using HTTP, and my first time dealing with HTML. Given a date, it generated a URL, visited that page, extracted some links, followed the links, extracted some text from the pages it found, and printed a report for me. That qualifies as a "crawler" or "spider" given the definition in play here (it "traverses the internet" by following a link,) but there was nothing especially hard about it.

    8. Re:Hmm... by Fordiman · · Score: 1

      You're assumingIneed to scrape hordes of sites. You're wrong. I generally only need one. The NS gets cached and the conny stays open.

      Still, they do take a while to run. 8 hours for the basketball box score scraper, and that's with cheater threading (using start /b /low to fork off a process for each year of scores). Not that I'm using that computer when it runs.

      --
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    9. Re:Hmm... by RLatimer · · Score: 1

      I write things like this in C, focusing mainly on NNTP and E-mail. After you've developed all the libraries you need once, it becomes quick to impelment new systems based on the same code. I would imagine the task would be somewhat simpler with PHP, due to the amount of 'stuff' that comes with it, but the complexity of the core code would be similar due to PHP being very similar to C.

      For pulling data from Web sites, for use when testing, I would typically use Wget (Win32) and parse it with findstr using a batch file. Doesn't get much simpler than that.

    10. Re:Hmm... by moro_666 · · Score: 1

      Ok, i phrased that a bit badly. I meant the builtin threads of ruby. They are as you say, not os threads, and therefor don't really always do the job in similar manners (sometimes it's better, sometimes it's worse).

        Perl's threads may be native, but they don't acquire the "share everything" model, but only share very certain types and that makes them a pita to use. I'm subscribed to the ithreads mailing list and it's a "deja vu" all the time. Thankfully there is Liz who is still helping the people out :)
      (Liz, keep up the good work :D)

        I think my first choice would be python because of it's threads implementation, the second would be java if i need a performance/portability middle ground, and if i have to for speed, i'd go for just pure C. It may be old, but it doesn't mean it isn't good.

      --

      I'd tell you the chances of this story being a dupe, but you wouldn't like it.
  2. Crawling efficiently by BadAnalogyGuy · · Score: 5, Informative

    Their example of a web crawler uses a queue to hold links. Since a link may appear twice, they use a lookup to scan the queue to see if the link is already loaded, and discard it if so.

    Better to use an associative array to cache the links since lookup is O(1). The Queue's lookup time is O(n) and if n gets large, so does the lookup time, not to mention that since you are checking each link the worst case scenario is a lookup time of O(n^2). A hash (associative array) will perform the same check in O(n). /([\W_\-]@\W+)/gs

    1. Re:Crawling efficiently by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Python has a builtin set type. Have no idea why they did not use it.

    2. Re:Crawling efficiently by Barnoid · · Score: 1

      True, but irrelevant. The queue's lookup/insertion time should be negligible compared to the time required to connect to the sites, download, and parse the content.

      Before your queue will get big enough for lookup/insertion time to become an issue, you'll first have to worry about bigger harddisks and more bandwith.

    3. Re:Crawling efficiently by Mr2cents · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Maybe because they don't know the first thing about efficiency? You'd be surprised how much programmers don't know/care about efficiency. Once, incidentilly also on a crawler (student project), I improved the function reading a tree of URL's from 1 hour(!) to 0.1second! The guy tested it on an example with 10 URL's and it worked, but his implementation was O(n^2) and involved copying huge amounts of memory each step. Don't ask me how he thought this would be scalable.

      --
      "It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
    4. Re:Crawling efficiently by Zonk+(troll) · · Score: 2, Funny
      Maybe because they don't know the first thing about efficiency? You'd be surprised how much programmers don't know/care about efficiency.


      If you're surprised about programmers not knowing/caring about efficiency, do you actually use a computer?
      --
      "The Federal Reserve is a fraudulent system."--Lew Rockwell
      End The FED. -
    5. Re:Crawling efficiently by Rakshasa+Taisab · · Score: 1

      Tell me then; how do they make a O(1) FIFO queue out of the associative array?

      No, not really interested in the answer, as I'm just pointing out that the code suddenly becomes (unnecessarily) much more complicated.

      --
      - These characters were randomly selected.
    6. Re:Crawling efficiently by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You're missing the point.

    7. Re:Crawling efficiently by Fordiman · · Score: 1

      I know. Also, I'm not exactly certain why they used Ruby.

      My favorite method is to use PHP as a backend for mshta; you can be guaranteed it'll run on any Windows machine, and you have the benefit that a linux machine will at least be able to run the back-end.

      --
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    8. Re:Crawling efficiently by BadAnalogyGuy · · Score: 1

      if !exists hash[currentURL]
            add hash, [currentURL]
            append array, [currentURL]


      That wasn't so hard, was it?

  3. The 90s called by dave562 · · Score: 5, Funny

    They want their technology back.

    1. Re:The 90s called by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      the 80s called, they want their joke back....

  4. What's the point? by XorNand · · Score: 1

    Why would anyone have a need to write a simple spider nowadays? In 2006, there has to be a better way than just following links. For example, it would be interesting to see something that crawled the various social bookmarking sites and corelated the various terms. For example, User A on Delicious and User B on Stumble Upon both bookmark a link about Pink Floyd and another one about Led Zep. If I'm searching for something about Floyd, the system could recommend some cool info about Led Zep too. (Email me if you need to know where to send my royality checks).

    --
    Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
    1. Re:What's the point? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      There are many reasons to build a web-crawler, for example imagine that you have a website with quite a few outgoing links to other sites. It is not hard to imagine that at times, the links going to external places may change in time... Now by having your own spider, it could check if all those pages are still there, and that it they still got the information you intended to link to. In case the site now have a permanent redirection to a new page, you could technically check the content automatically for whether it is the same or not, and update your page with the new links. Pages that are unavailable may be temporarily or permanently removed.

      I am in fact using a few different home grown web-crawler myself!

    2. Re:What's the point? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No self-respecting Led Head would want to read about Pink Floyd.

    3. Re:What's the point? by The_Wilschon · · Score: 1

      One might want to study social networks. What better way to do this than to make a graph (as in the nodes and edges type) of myspace or facebook and study that? How are you going to do this? Well, seems like making a spider would be a quite sensible way.

      --
      SIGSEGV caught, terminating

      wait... not that kind of sig.
    4. Re:What's the point? by brunascle · · Score: 1
      Why would anyone have a need to write a simple spider nowadays?
      simple. to add a search engine to your site without having to rely on someone else's code.

      in fact, i'm going to have to do this fairly soon. i've already written a search for articles, but now customers are complaining that they cant search for "customer service." bah!

      unfortunately, IBM's spider example is pretty pathetic.
    5. Re:What's the point? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No self-respecting Floydian would want to read about Dead Zeppelin.

    6. Re:What's the point? by try_anything · · Score: 1
      Why would anyone have a need to write a simple spider nowadays?

      You're right. Web 2.0 changes everything. Some people are just conservative, though. My parents are still using bookshelves even though maglev trains made bookshelves obsolete decades ago.

      In 2006, there has to be a better way than just following links. For example, it would be interesting to see something that crawled the various social bookmarking sites and corelated the various terms.

      You mean follow links and *gasp* do something with the data you find? It'll never happen. The experts have found that following random links for no particular reason and ignoring the data found there is sufficient for all purposes, and your spunky challenge to this paradigm will not be allowed to stand!

  5. downloads by Bananatree3 · · Score: 4, Informative

    for those of us who don't have them, here are the basics:



    Wget: http://www.gnu.org/software/wget/.

    Curl http://curl.haxx.se/
    1. Re:downloads by WoLpH · · Score: 1

      And if you really don't want to RTFA and still want to rip a website, try this command (that is, if you have wget installed) "wget -m http://www.server.com/"
      A partially better alternative is httrack, it has more features but also tends to be less table ;)

    2. Re:downloads by goarilla · · Score: 1

      what about netcat: http://netcat.sourceforge.net/

  6. yes, I did RTFA by Bananatree3 · · Score: 1

    the article mostly talks about scripting languages. And yes I do know wget come with a lot of Linux distros, but not EVERYONE has it. So there, I DID read TFA.

    1. Re:yes, I did RTFA by Faylone · · Score: 4, Funny

      You RTFA? Are you sure you're in the right place?

  7. Re:Obligatory by poormanjoe · · Score: 1

    I for one welcome our out-of-date-eight-legged overlords!

    --
    I want to be retired when I grow up.
  8. Hardly linux-specific by h_benderson · · Score: 5, Insightful

    All my love for linux aside, this has to do nothing with linux, the kernel (or even the GNU/Linux, the OS). It works just as well on any other unix-derivate or even windows.

  9. some points by cucucu · · Score: 5, Interesting
    • Don't forget to check and respect robots.txt. Python has a module that helps you parse that file
    • Samie and its Python port Pamie are your friends. You can automate IE so your script is treated as an human and not discriminated as a robot.
    • I use such beasts to do one-click time reporting at work and one-click cartoon collecting in my favorite newspaper.
    • And once I even repeatedly voted on an online poll and changed the course of history.
    • Ah, yes, TFA was about building a spider on Linux. I didn't check if my one-click IE scripts work on IE/Wine/Linux.
    • If I write an one-click script for online shopping, does it infringe the infamous Amazon patent?
    • When will Firefox's automation capabilities match those of IE?
    1. Re:some points by coaxial · · Score: 1

      Don't forget to check and respect robots.txt. Python has a module that helps you parse that file

      [sarcasm] Why? Google doesn't. [/sarcasm]

      And once I even repeatedly voted on an online poll and changed the course of history.

      So did I! Back in 2000 I got the Underwear Gnomes episode of South Park aired.

      I think the best use of a spider in an online poll was by whatever Red Sox fan voted a million times for Nomar Garciapara to make the all star team back in 2000.

    2. Re:some points by SanityInAnarchy · · Score: 1

      You don't want to automate IE. Aside from the fact that it's IE, you don't want to use any browser unless you have to. Mechanize is your friend, and you can always change the user agent string if you want to be a jackass.

      Firefox's automation capabilities don't need to match those of IE, for pretty much the same reason. The only thing Mechanize can't do is JavaScript, and there are vague plans about that.

      --
      Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
    3. Re:some points by VGPowerlord · · Score: 1

      Are you sure that automation still works in IE7?

      --
      GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
    4. Re:some points by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Can't say how automation in IE works, but won't the extensions concept for firefox match that automation?
      i.e. an extension like greasemonkey ;)

    5. Re:some points by cucucu · · Score: 1

      no, I didn't update. I have FF for human browsing and IE6 for robot browsing.

    6. Re:some points by killjoe · · Score: 3, Informative

      "When will Firefox's automation capabilities match those of IE?"

      It's always had it. Look up XUL some day. The entire browser is written in xul.

      --
      evil is as evil does
    7. Re:some points by Gr8Apes · · Score: 1
      When will Firefox's automation capabilities match those of IE?


      You have that wrong. It's when will IE's capabilities (automation and otherwise) catch up with FireFox.
      --
      The cesspool just got a check and balance.
    8. Re:some points by IchBinEinPenguin · · Score: 1

      When will Firefox's automation capabilities match those of IE?

      Yeah, 'cos I really miss having my machine automatically turned into a Zombie.......

    9. Re:some points by jdigriz · · Score: 1

      >When will Firefox's automation capabilities match those of IE?

      Now. http://www.openqa.org/selenium-ide/

  10. Web crawler in one line by Znort · · Score: 0

    http://www.google.com/

  11. 'Steve? Send the web spiders.' by Channard · · Score: 1

    Dammit, I was hoping this was article was about the evolution of Dr Weird's phone spiders, mechanical creatures that could be sent down your cable line to maul anyone sending you phishing emails and spam.

    1. Re:'Steve? Send the web spiders.' by kfg · · Score: 1

      I was hoping this was article was about the evolution of Dr Weird's phone spiders

      It's a web spider, man; not a killer robot spider, but I'll tell you it's a web spider from South Jersey if it'll make you feel any better.

      KFG

  12. Oh sweet Jesus! by msormune · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Pull the article out. The last thing we need is more indexing bots.

  13. Re:Just what the internet needs... by ComaVN · · Score: 3, Informative

    I think that's robots.txt, *not* spider.txt

    --
    Be wary of any facts that confirm your opinion.
  14. crawling is not so trivial by cucucu · · Score: 2, Interesting
    As the two students who started a little web search company, crawling the web is not trivial: http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html. An excerpt follows.


    Running a web crawler is a challenging task. There are tricky performance and reliability issues and even more importantly, there are social issues. Crawling is the most fragile application since it involves interacting with hundreds of thousands of web servers and various name servers which are all beyond the control of the system.

    In order to scale to hundreds of millions of web pages, Google has a fast distributed crawling system. A single URLserver serves lists of URLs to a number of crawlers (we typically ran about 3). Both the URLserver and the crawlers are implemented in Python. Each crawler keeps roughly 300 connections open at once. This is necessary to retrieve web pages at a fast enough pace. At peak speeds, the system can crawl over 100 web pages per second using four crawlers. This amounts to roughly 600K per second of data. A major performance stress is DNS lookup. Each crawler maintains a its own DNS cache so it does not need to do a DNS lookup before crawling each document. Each of the hundreds of connections can be in a number of different states: looking up DNS, connecting to host, sending request, and receiving response. These factors make the crawler a complex component of the system. It uses asynchronous IO to manage events, and a number of queues to move page fetches from state to state.

    It turns out that running a crawler which connects to more than half a million servers, and generates tens of millions of log entries generates a fair amount of email and phone calls. Because of the vast number of people coming on line, there are always those who do not know what a crawler is, because this is the first one they have seen. Almost daily, we receive an email something like, "Wow, you looked at a lot of pages from my web site. How did you like it?" There are also some people who do not know about the robots exclusion protocol, and think their page should be protected from indexing by a statement like, "This page is copyrighted and should not be indexed", which needless to say is difficult for web crawlers to understand. Also, because of the huge amount of data involved, unexpected things will happen. For example, our system tried to crawl an online game. This resulted in lots of garbage messages in the middle of their game! It turns out this was an easy problem to fix. But this problem had not come up until we had downloaded tens of millions of pages. Because of the immense variation in web pages and servers, it is virtually impossible to test a crawler without running it on large part of the Internet. Invariably, there are hundreds of obscure problems which may only occur on one page out of the whole web and cause the crawler to crash, or worse, cause unpredictable or incorrect behavior. Systems which access large parts of the Internet need to be designed to be very robust and carefully tested. Since large complex systems such as crawlers will invariably cause problems, there needs to be significant resources devoted to reading the email and solving these problems as they come up.
  15. Quality of article? by interp · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I've never programmed in Ruby, but I think the comment in Listing 1 says it all:
    "Iterate through response hash"

    Why would somebody want to do that?
    A quick net search "reveals": A simple resp["server"] is all you need.
    Maybe the article was meant to be posted on thedailywtf.com?

    1. Re:Quality of article? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's not WTF quality, but is less than elegant. This would be better:

      require 'net/http'

      ARGV.each do |host|
          begin
              res = nil
              Net::HTTP.start(host, 80) do |http|
                  res = http.head('/')
              end

              case res
              when Net::HTTPSuccess
                  puts "The server at #{host} is #{res['server']}"
              else
                  puts "Request failed"
              end
          rescue Exception => e
              puts "Request failed: #{e.message}"
          end
      end

  16. Re:Just what the internet needs... by scdeimos · · Score: 1

    How does "spider.txt" get an Insightful when it's "robots.txt"? Sheesh, bump the Mods Roster.

  17. I hate by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    these Eight legged freaks!!!

    1. Re:I hate by kfg · · Score: 1

      Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean people aren't crawling your site.

      KFG

  18. Re-inventing a square wheel by rduke15 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Basically, the article gives you ruby and python examples of how to get web pages, and (badly) parse them for information. The same thing everyone has been doing for at least a decade with Perl and the appropriate modules, or whatever other tools, except that most know how to do it correctly.

    The first script is merely ridiculous: 12 lines of code (not counting empty and comment lines) to do:

    HEAD slashdot.org | grep 'Server: '

    But it gets worse. To extract a quote from a page, the second script suggests this:

    stroffset = resp.body =~ /class="price">/
    subset = resp.body.slice(stroffset+14, 10)
    limit = subset.index('<')
    print ARGV[0] + " current stock price " + subset[0..limit-1] +
    " (from stockmoney.com)\n"

    You don't need to know ruby to see what it does: it looks for the first occurence of 'class="price">' and just takes the 10 characters that follow. The author obviously never used that sort of thing for more than a couple of days, or he would know how quickly that will break and spit out rubbish.

    Finally, there is a Python script. At first glance, it looks slightly better. It uses what appears to be the Python equivalent of HTML::Parse to get links. But a closer look reveals that, to find links, it just gets the first attribute of any a tag and uses that as the link. Never mind if the 1st attribute doesn't happen to be "href".

    I suppose the only point of that article were the IBM links at the end:

    Order the SEK for Linux, a two-DVD set containing the latest IBM trial software for Linux from DB2®, Lotus®, Rational®, Tivoli®, and WebSphere®.

    And that is in a section for Linux developers on the IBM site? Maybe the did copy stuff from SCO after all?...

    1. Re:Re-inventing a square wheel by biffta · · Score: 1

      I'm sensing that you didn't like the script then?

    2. Re:Re-inventing a square wheel by kayditty · · Score: 1
      uhh.. what exactly is HEAD slashdot.org? I'm guessing you mean something like:
      perl -e 'print "HEAD / HTTP/1.1\nHost: slashdot.org\n\n"' | nc slashdot.org 80 | grep -i Server
    3. Re:Re-inventing a square wheel by rduke15 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      what exactly is HEAD slashdot.org

      It's a (perl) script which comes with libwww-perl which either is now part of the standard Perl distribution, or is installed by default in any decent Linux distribution.

      If you don't have HEAD, you can type a bit more and get the server with LWP::Simple's head() method (then you don't need grep):

      $ perl -MLWP::Simple -e '$s=(head "http://slashdot.org/" )[4]; print $s'

      Either way is better than those useless 12 lines of ruby (I'm sure ruby can also do the same in a similarly simple way, but that author just doesn't have a clue)

    4. Re:Re-inventing a square wheel by matvei · · Score: 1
      Finally, there is a Python script. At first glance, it looks slightly better. It uses what appears to be the Python equivalent of HTML::Parse to get links. But a closer look reveals that, to find links, it just gets the first attribute of any a tag and uses that as the link. Never mind if the 1st attribute doesn't happen to be "href".

      What bugs me the most about this article is that the author keeps using the most generic libraries he can find instead of something written for this exact task. He should have used WWW:Mechanize for Perl or mechanize for Python. I'm sure there's something like this for Ruby, too.

    5. Re:Re-inventing a square wheel by nkv · · Score: 1

      I think the more relevant issue is that this is a bit of a toy program. You fetch a page, pseudo-parse it, find links etc. Why is this such a big source of news? The code is bad, the objective is somewhat simple and it's hardly a Linux specific thing (like someone else here mentioned).

    6. Re:Re-inventing a square wheel by Bogtha · · Score: 1

      The first script is merely ridiculous: 12 lines of code (not counting empty and comment lines) to do:

      HEAD slashdot.org | grep 'Server: '

      This code won't catch 404s and other errors. Theirs will. Furthermore, assuming the Ruby library is conformant, their code can deal with multi-line headers, while yours would break.

      Things like grep aren't suitable for parsing HTTP responses. You might get results for simple cases, but there are all kinds of corner cases out there that require a proper script. Go ahead and use grep for quick hacks, but you're causing yourself trouble down the line if you expect to use it for anything non-trivial like a spider.

      --
      Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
    7. Re:Re-inventing a square wheel by DJDutcher · · Score: 1

      More amusing is HEAD slashdot.org | grep Bender

    8. Re:Re-inventing a square wheel by Xenna · · Score: 1

      Hah, I must have written at least a few dozen lib-www scripts, but I didn't know about HEAD.

      I always used lynx -source -head http://slashdot.org/ wish is a lot more typing...

      Thanks,
      X.

    9. Re:Re-inventing a square wheel by ChaosDiscord · · Score: 1

      Indeed. For most of my simple spidering needs I've found Perl's WWW::Mechanize to be a dream. I say what I mean: go get this page, find a link labeled "Today's Story" and follow it, on the resulting page find the second form and fill in the username and password fields with $username and $password, click submit, return the resulting page. I've found it useful for scraping sites with regular updates that have unpredictable URLs but constant links. Perl.com's "Screen-scraping with WWW::Mechanize" is a good introduction, then check out the full documentation.

      --
      Search 2010 Gen Con events
    10. Re:Re-inventing a square wheel by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      During the LWP module install, it asks if you want to install HEAD, GET, POST etc.
      But it is a problem for some OS X users head/HEAD

      http://use.perl.org/~ct/journal/6556

  19. Actually... by SanityInAnarchy · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Some websites do not have good search functionality. Sometimes it's an area that Google doesn't crawl (robots.txt and such), and sometimes I'm looking for something very, very specific.

    Regardless, I do, in fact, build spiders. For instance, in an MMO I play, all users can have webpages, so it's very useful to have a spider as part of a clan/guild/whatever to crawl the webpages looking for users who have illegal items and such. In a more general way, there is a third-party site which collects vital statistics of everyone who puts those in their user page, so you can get lists of the most powerful people in the game, the richest people, etc.

    --
    Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
    1. Re:Actually... by pan_piper · · Score: 1

      So... if you want to discuss your illegal items it would be better to design your site in Flash?

    2. Re:Actually... by SanityInAnarchy · · Score: 1

      Not in this game. The pages are not actually user-created, they are generated daily from the actual game data and hosted by the company who runs the game. The only thing you have control over is whether your inventory/bank/whatever appears on the page, and I can just as easily scan for people who refuse to list them.

      So, it's actually much more efficient to scan for a specific string that I know will be there for a particular item -- it's literally impossible for them to try to mask it with, say, leetspeak.

      --
      Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
  20. That reminds me. by archeopterix · · Score: 2, Informative
    Also, because of the huge amount of data involved, unexpected things will happen. For example, our system tried to crawl an online game. This resulted in lots of garbage messages in the middle of their game! It turns out this was an easy problem to fix.
    Unfortunately, many web developers still ignore the inevitable, leaving their sites vulnerable to the dreaded Googlebot "attack". While most of the spider developer manuals (TFA included) stress the importance of being polite (respect robots.txt & friends), most of the "become teh Web Master in x days" books don't even mention robots.txt. Go figure.

    For a good chuckle, see The Spider of Doom on the Daily WTF.

    And please use robots.txt.

    And go see Google Webmaster tools.

    And don't wear socks with sandals. Well, ok, this one is optional.

  21. It's a trap! by radu.stanca · · Score: 2, Funny

    Ah, I can see it clearly now!

    1. Post to Slashdot a decoy article(it includes Linux in the subjest) with new spam tricks
    2. Watch if spam increases 30% next days
    3. Bribe Cowboy Neal with 10G midget lesbian pr0n and get IP adresses of the art. readers
    4. Load shotgun and make the world a better place!

  22. Been there, done that by xarak · · Score: 1


    I guess most male CS students will have coded something similar at least once to D/L pr0n.

    I did one in shell and one in TCL/TK.

    --
    Atheism is a non-prophet organisation
    1. Re:Been there, done that by pandrijeczko · · Score: 1

      Ah! So I can tell the missus it was *YOU* who put those images on my PC then!

      --
      Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
  23. Okay kids... by Balinares · · Score: 4, Informative
    Just so people who may come across this know, if you're going to do some HTML or XHTML parsing in Python, you'd be insane not to use BeautifulSoup or a similar tool.

    Example to find all links in a document:
    from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
    for tag in BeautifulSoup(html_document).findAll("a"):
      print tag["href"]
    Yes, it's that simple. For an URL opener that also handles proxies, cookies, HTTP auth, SSL and so on, look into the urllib2 module that ships natively with Python.
    --

    -- B.
    This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
    1. Re:Okay kids... by arevos · · Score: 1
      I couldn't agree more. The author also neglects to use useful standard functions like urllib.urlopen, instead building his own HTTP downloader function. He'd also do well to use urlparse.urljoin to turn a relative href attribute into an absolute URL, and urlparse.urlparse to check things like the protocol and host.

      For example:
      from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
      from urllib import urlopen
      from urlparse import urljoin, urlparse
       
      visited_urls = set()
      url_stack = []
       
      for tag in BeautifulSoup(urlopen(url)).findAll("a"):
          link_url = urljoin(url, tag["href"])
          if urlparse(link_url)[0] == "http" and link_url not in visited_urls:
              url_stack.append(link_url)
  24. User-Agent by Joebert · · Score: 1, Troll

    They forgot the set the User-Agent header to IE.

    --
    Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
    1. Re:User-Agent by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      How is that a troll? Setting the User-Agent header to that of some popular browser (like IE) allows the spider to go to sites where it might otherwise be rejected. Just think of the sites that have those stupid "your browser is not supported" messages instead of presenting the page and letting your browser render/mangle it however it sees fit.

  25. Re:Just what the internet needs... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Also, following relative and site-relative links, and obeying things like "base href", "href='javascript:...'" and the case-sensitivity of URLs seems to be too difficult for many beginning crawler programmers.

  26. Re:Obligatory by k33l0r · · Score: 2, Funny

    Has there ever been a news story on Slashdot that doesn't have a "I, for one, welcome our new [Insert here] overlords" comment attached to it?

  27. A similar application by swm · · Score: 1

    An app to find broken links on your web site.

    Checking links with LinkCheck
    http://world.std.com/~swmcd/steven/perl/pm/lc/link check.html

  28. Reinventing the wheel by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I know, I know. Flame me. But I found Heritrix http://crawler.archive.org/ is a very polished package. Used it for my Masters research, and found that it is very extensible. Useful if you are doing real crawling, ie not concentrating on one site.

  29. Re:Obligatory by Bloke+down+the+pub · · Score: 1

    I for one welcome our new "I for one welcome our new X overlords" overlords.

    --
    It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
  30. Incorrect Title by OneSmartFellow · · Score: 2


    Should be: "How Not ..."

    I don't think I am alone in my thinking

  31. The guy can't even code! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Yep, it's _very_ intelligent to loop through dictionary for a specific item. (I may be wrong, since I wouldn't even have nightmares about coding ruby, but it sure as hell looks like it...)

  32. Re:Obligatory by manastungare · · Score: 1

    I, for one, welcome our clichéd-overlord-joke-bearing Slashdot comments.

  33. Nostarch press book by praxis22 · · Score: 1

    Nostarch press are releasing a book about this soon, they had a mockup on display at the Frankfurt book fair.

  34. MORE CORN!!! by everphilski · · Score: 1

    It's not different at all, steve!

  35. What about Archie, Jughead, or Veronica by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Don't forget that the inet is not just http..

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archie_search_engine

  36. Nutch by Dante · · Score: 1

    Why not Nutch?

    http://lucene.apache.org/nutch/

    --
    "think of it as evolution in action"
  37. Walk the dom directly by johnpeb · · Score: 1

    Once i had to collect a lot of info from a website. I used java and wget and some java html parser library (possibly JTidy). anyway the code was very short and clean. I'd recommend DOM walking to other solutions when the data isn't trivial.

  38. screen-scraper by toddcw · · Score: 1

    screen-scraper (http://www.screen-scraper.com/) runs fabulously on Linux, and integrates well with most modern programming languages. It can save all kinds of time over writing Perl and Python scripts. There's a free (as in beer) version available, and a pro version if more features are wanted.

    1. Re:screen-scraper by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You forgot to mention that you wrote that particular piece of software, and that you're hoping this will drum up some business for you.

  39. Re:Okay kids...(in Ruby) by amran · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I couldn't resist - in Ruby, using the beautiful (but much understated) hpricot library:

    doc = Hpricot(open(html_document))
    (doc/"a").each { |a| puts a.attributes['href'] }

    Check it out - I've been using it for a project, and it's really fast and really easy to use (supports both xpath and css for parsing links). For spidering you should check out the ruby mechanize library (which is like perl's www-mechanize, but also uses hpricot, making parsing the returned document much easier).

  40. I did similar things in college... by GWBasic · · Score: 1

    I did similar things in college with Perl. (shudders*) The programs were OS-neutral; I think I developed mine in Windows under Cygwin.

    *Yes, I know Slashdot is written in Perl.

    --
    No, I will not work for your startup
  41. Re:Obligatory by tehcyder · · Score: 1
    Has there ever been a news story on Slashdot that doesn't have a "I, for one, welcome our new [Insert here] overlords" comment attached to it?
    No.

    Next question?

    --
    To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
  42. Slashdot: Drivel for idiots. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    That's it.

    I'm leaving.

    You won't have Anonymous Coward to kick around anymore.

    Who needs this much drivel, from the idiots who write the article, to the idiots who submit it, to the idiots who approve it?

    Garrrrgh.