📅 2024-05-21 — Session: Developed and Optimized Web Crawler for Educational Site
🕒 18:25–19:55
🏷️ Labels: Web Scraping, Scrapy, Crawler, Python, Optimization
📂 Project: Dev
⭐ Priority: MEDIUM
Session Goal
The session aimed to develop and optimize a web crawler for an educational institution’s website using Scrapy, focusing on internal links up to a depth of 4 levels.
Key Activities
- Guidance on Crawler Creation: Detailed instructions were followed to create a crawler using Scrapy, organize link networks with NetworkX, and extract specific information using BeautifulSoup.
- Project Planning: Developed a plan to systematically detect and organize linked pages from the main faculty page.
- Crawler Configuration: Configured a Scrapy crawler to explore educational web pages, implementing depth-limited search and visualizing link networks with NetworkX.
- Log Analysis: Analyzed Scrapy crawler logs, examining exploration depth, download statistics, duplicate handling, memory usage, errors, and spider configuration improvements.
- BFS Implementation: Adjusted Scrapy settings to implement a breadth-first search (BFS) approach with specific configuration steps.
- URL Filtering Optimization: Enhanced the crawler to filter irrelevant URLs using a domain exclusion list, improving data quality.
- Connection Error Solutions: Diagnosed and provided solutions for connection errors related to
robots.txt, including timeout adjustments, disabling robot middleware, retry handling, and blocking problematic domains.
Achievements
- Successfully developed a crawler with depth-limited search and BFS capabilities.
- Improved data quality through URL filtering and optimized crawler configuration.
- Resolved connection issues, enhancing crawler reliability.
Pending Tasks
- Further testing and validation of the crawler’s performance and accuracy.
- Exploration of additional optimization techniques for large-scale crawling projects.