How to best develop web crawlers

Posted by Fernando Barrocal on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Fernando Barrocal
Published on 2009-02-07T02:15:36Z Indexed on 2010/04/05 3:53 UTC
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web-crawler

Heyall,

I am used to create some crawlers to compile information and as I come to a website I need the info I start a new crawler specific for that site, using shell scripts most of the time and sometime PHP.

The way I do is with a simple for to iterate for the page list, a wget do download it and sed, tr, awk or other utilities to clean the page and grab the specific info I need.

All the process takes some time depending on the site and more to download all pages. And I often steps into an AJAX site that complicates everything

I was wondering if there is better ways to do that, faster ways or even some applications or languages to help such work.

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