Implementation of Efficient Distributed Crawler through Stepwise Crawling Node Allocation

Abstract

Various websites have been created due to the increased use of the Internet, and the number of documents distributed through these websites has increased proportionally. However, it is not easy to collect newly updated documents rapidly. Web crawling methods have been used to continuously collect and manage new documents, whereas existing crawling systems applying a single node demonstrate limited performances. Furthermore, crawlers applying distribution methods exhibit a problem related to effective node management for crawling. This study proposes an efficient distributed crawler through stepwise crawling node allocation, which identifies websites' properties and establishes crawling policies based on the properties identified to collect a large number of documents from multiple websites. The proposed crawler can calculate the number of documents included in a website, compare data collection time and the amount of data collected based on the number of nodes allocated to a specific website by repeatedly visiting the website, and automatically allocate the optimal number of nodes to each website for crawling. An experiment is conducted where the proposed and single-node methods are applied to 12 different websites; the experimental result indicates that the proposed crawler's data collection time decreased significantly compared with that of a single node crawler. This result is obtained because the proposed crawler applied data collection policies according to websites. Besides, it is confirmed that the work rate of the proposed model increased.