Implementation of a Parallel Web Crawler for the Odysseus Large-Scale Search Engine

As the size of the web is growing explosively, search engines are becoming increasingly important as the primary means to retrieve information from the Internet. A search engine periodically downloads web pages and stores them in the database to provide readers with up-to-date search results. The web crawler is a program that downloads and stores web pages for this purpose. A large-scale search engines uses a parallel web crawler to retrieve the collection of web pages maximizing the download rate. However, the service architecture or experimental analysis of parallel web crawlers has not been fully discussed in the literature. In this paper, we propose an architecture of the parallel web crawler and discuss implementation issues in detail. The proposed parallel web crawler is based on the coordinator/agent model using multiple machines to download web pages in parallel. The coordinator/agent model consists of multiple agent machines to collect web pages and a single coordinator machine to manage them. The parallel web crawler consists of three components: a crawling module for collecting web pages, a converting module for transforming the web pages into a database-friendly format, a ranking module for rating web pages based on their relative importance. We explain each component of the parallel web crawler and implementation methods in detail. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments to analyze the effectiveness of the parallel web crawler. The experimental results clarify the merit of our architecture in that the proposed parallel web crawler is scalable to the number of web pages to crawl and the number of machines used.