Common Crawl Foundation Providing Data For Search Researchers

Posted by Unknown on Monday November 14, 2011 @01:15PM from the doesn't-archive-dot-org-do-that dept.

mikejuk writes with an excerpt from an article in I Programmer: "If you have ever thought that you could do a better job than Google but were intimidated by the hardware needed to build a web index, then the Common Crawl Foundation has a solution for you. It has indexed 5 billion web pages, placed the results on Amazon EC2/S3 and invites you to make use of it for free. All you have to do is setup your own Amazon EC2 Hadoop cluster and pay for the time you use it — accessing the data is free. This idea is to open up the whole area of web search to experiment and innovation. So if you want to challenge Google now you can't use the excuse that you can't afford it." Their weblog promises source code for everything eventually. One thing I've always wondered is why no distributed crawlers or search engines have ever come about.

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Re:Saves you on bandwidth by Gumber · 2011-11-14 14:11 · Score: 5, Insightful

Bitch moan, bitch moan. If I had a need for such a dataset, I think I'd be damn grateful that I didn't have to collect it myself. As for the cost of processing the pages, the article suggests that running a hadoop job on the whole dataset on EC2 might be in the neighborhood of $100. That's not that costly.