Tiny basic multi-threaded web crawler in Python

Tiny basic multi-threaded web crawler in Python

If you need a simple web crawler that will scour the web for a while to download random site’s content – this code is for you. Usage:

Where https://cnn.com is your seed site. It could…

How we quadrupled the performance of Elasticsearch

How we quadrupled the performance of Elasticsearch

Well, that’s a misleading title. We actually quadrupled the performance of our brand monitoring alert system that uses Elasticsearch’s Percolator, but that would have been a much longer title. Some background Buzzilla…

Webz.io Tip: Search for top performing (viral) posts

Webz.io Tip: Search for top performing (viral) posts

Here at Webz, our crawlers download millions of posts a day from millions of sources. When searching for web data among these many sources, you may want to limit your results to…

Building a Better Search Query

Building a Better Search Query

Many factors can affect streaming data relevancy. When the data you consume isn’t ordered by relevancy, rather by the time it was crawled, getting the relevant posts is essential. I would like…

Webz.io Tips & Tricks: Content Marketing & SEO

Webz.io Tips & Tricks: Content Marketing & SEO

I would like to share with you 2 simple tips about how to leverage Webz.io to promote your website, product or service organically.

Webz.io Tips & Tricks: Search for Reviews

Webz.io Tips & Tricks: Search for Reviews

Are you looking to focus your data search specifically on consumer generated reviews? Here are a couple of simple Webz.io tricks that might help: Limit your query to specific sites You can…

Vertical Aggregation and Pattern Matching Crawlers

Vertical Aggregation and Pattern Matching Crawlers

After bashing various crawling techniques, I would like to describe the technique we use here, at Webz.io, a technology that was developed over the past 8 years. Our crawlers were developed with…

Crawling Horrors – Computer Vision Crawlers

Crawling Horrors – Computer Vision Crawlers

So if RSS Crawlers are bad, Browser Scraping isn’t efficient, what about computer vision web-page analyzers? This technology uses machine learning and computer vision to extract information from web pages by interpreting…

Crawling Horrors – Browser Scraping

Crawling Horrors – Browser Scraping

In my previous blog post, I wrote about RSS crawlers, and why they don’t really work. In this post I want to discuss the technique of using a headless browser to parse…

Crawling Horrors – RSS Crawlers

Crawling Horrors – RSS Crawlers

One of the fastest, simplest and unfortunately wrong ways of extracting content out of a website, is by reading its RSS feeds. I will show you how its done and why it’s…