Developed and Optimized Web Crawler for Educational Site

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Developed and Optimized Web Crawler for Educational Site

  • Day: 2024-05-21
  • Time: 18:25 to 19:55
  • Project: Dev
  • Workspace: WP 2: Operational
  • Status: Completed
  • Priority: MEDIUM
  • Assignee: Matías Nehuen Iglesias
  • Tags: Web Scraping, Scrapy, Crawler, Python, Optimization

Description

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.

Evidence

  • source_file=2024-05-21.sessions.jsonl, line_number=1, event_count=0, session_id=2d40e90f5ad1fa1b43454928ad2eecb1b4a7dc806d7acf35c27a804a8d4a5eac
  • event_ids: []

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