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CommonCrawl VS Heritrix

Compare CommonCrawl VS Heritrix and see what are their differences

CommonCrawl logo CommonCrawl

Common Crawl

Heritrix logo Heritrix

Heritrix is the Internet Archive's open-source, extensible, web-scale, archival-quality web...
  • CommonCrawl Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-16
  • Heritrix Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-05-06

CommonCrawl features and specs

  • Comprehensive Coverage
    CommonCrawl provides a broad and extensive archive of the web, enabling access to a wide range of information and data across various domains and topics.
  • Open Access
    It is freely accessible to everyone, allowing researchers, developers, and analysts to use the data without subscription or licensing fees.
  • Regular Updates
    The data is updated regularly, which ensures that users have access to relatively current web pages and content for their projects.
  • Format and Compatibility
    The data is provided in a standardized format (WARC) that is compatible with many tools and platforms, facilitating ease of use and integration.
  • Community and Support
    It has an active community and documentation that helps new users get started and find support when needed.

Possible disadvantages of CommonCrawl

  • Data Volume
    The dataset is extremely large, which can make it challenging to download, process, and store without significant computational resources.
  • Noise and Redundancy
    A large amount of the data may be redundant or irrelevant, requiring additional filtering and processing to extract valuable insights.
  • Lack of Structured Data
    CommonCrawl primarily consists of raw HTML, lacking structured data formats that can be directly queried and analyzed easily.
  • Legal and Ethical Concerns
    The use of data from CommonCrawl needs to be carefully managed to comply with copyright laws and ethical guidelines regarding data usage.
  • Potential for Outdating
    Despite regular updates, the data might not always reflect the most current state of web content at the time of analysis.

Heritrix features and specs

  • Flexibility
    Heritrix is highly configurable, allowing users to tailor the crawling process according to specific needs and goals such as specifying depth of crawl and custom URL filtering.
  • Scalability
    Heritrix is designed to handle large-scale web archiving tasks, capable of efficiently crawling large volumes of web data, making it suitable for institutions like national libraries.
  • Open Source
    Being open-source, Heritrix allows users to freely access and modify the source code to fit specific needs, fostering a community of developers who can contribute to its development.
  • Robust Documentation
    Heritrix offers comprehensive documentation and community resources that provide guidance and support to users, helping them effectively utilize the tool.
  • Advanced Features
    The tool offers advanced features like politeness strategies and scheduling capabilities, which help in managing server loads and ensuring respectful crawling practices.

Possible disadvantages of Heritrix

  • Complex Setup
    The initial setup and configuration of Heritrix can be complex and time-consuming, requiring technical expertise, which may be challenging for beginners.
  • Resource Intensive
    Heritrix can be resource-intensive, requiring significant computational power and memory, especially when dealing with large-scale web crawling tasks.
  • Steeper Learning Curve
    The extensive features and flexibility of Heritrix come with a steep learning curve, which may require users to invest considerable time in learning the system.
  • Limited User Interface
    Heritrix mainly operates through a command-line interface or limited web interface, which may not appeal to users who prefer more intuitive or graphical user interfaces.
  • Dependency Management
    Managing and resolving dependencies can be challenging in Heritrix due to its reliance on a range of external libraries and components, which can complicate installation and upgrades.

CommonCrawl videos

No CommonCrawl videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

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Heritrix videos

IIPC Tech 2015 - Heritrix Rest API - Roger G. Coram

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to CommonCrawl and Heritrix)
Search Engine
86 86%
14% 14
Custom Search Engine
0 0%
100% 100
Internet Search
100 100%
0% 0
Custom Search
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, CommonCrawl seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 97 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

CommonCrawl mentions (97)

  • US vs. Google Amicus Curiae Brief of Y Combinator in Support of Plaintiffs [pdf]
    Https://commoncrawl.org/ This is, of course, no different than the natural monopoly of root DNS servers (managed as a public good). - Source: Hacker News / 23 days ago
  • Searching among 3.2 Billion Common Crawl URLs with <10µs lookup time and on a 48€/month server
    Two weeks ago, I was having a chat with a friend about SEO, specifically on whether or not a specific domain is crawled by Common Crawl and if it did which URLs? After searching for a while, I realized there is no “true” search on the Common Crawl Index where you can get the list of URLs of a domain or search for a term and get list of domains that their URLs, contain that term. Common Crawl is an extremely large... - Source: dev.to / 25 days ago
  • Xiaomi unveils open-source AI reasoning model MiMo
    CommonCrawl [1] is the biggest and easiest crawling dataset around, collecting data since 2008. Pretty much everyone uses this as their base dataset for training foundation LLMs and since it's mostly English, all models perform well in English. [1] https://commoncrawl.org/. - Source: Hacker News / about 1 month ago
  • Devs say AI crawlers dominate traffic, forcing blocks on entire countries
    Isn't this by problem solved by using commoncrawl data. I wonder what changed to AI companies to do mass crawling individually. https://commoncrawl.org/. - Source: Hacker News / 2 months ago
  • Amazon's AI crawler is making my Git server unstable
    There is project whose goal is to avoid this crawling-induced DDoS by maintaining a single web index: https://commoncrawl.org/. - Source: Hacker News / 4 months ago
View more

Heritrix mentions (0)

We have not tracked any mentions of Heritrix yet. Tracking of Heritrix recommendations started around Mar 2021.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing CommonCrawl and Heritrix, you can also consider the following products

Google - Google Search, also referred to as Google Web Search or simply Google, is a web search engine developed by Google. It is the most used search engine on the World Wide Web

Scrapy - Scrapy | A Fast and Powerful Scraping and Web Crawling Framework

Mwmbl Search - An open source, non-profit search engine implemented in python

Manticore search - https://www.

Apache Nutch - Apache Nutch is a highly extensible and scalable open source web crawler software project.

DuckDuckGo: Bang - Search thousands of sites directly from DuckDuckGo