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ccrawl

Guides

Task-oriented walkthroughs for the things people actually do with Common Crawl.

Each guide is built around a job rather than a command: finding pages, fetching their content, working with whole archives, querying the columnar index, building a local dataset, building a Markdown corpus, looking up ranks, scanning the news feed, exploring the host graph, running a recrawl engine, scheduling recrawls by change rate, building a local search index, extracting content signals, and serving an API. They assume you have run the quick start.

Finding pages Query the URL index for captures of a URL or a path pattern, and filter the results. Fetching content Pull the exact bytes Common Crawl captured for a URL, as text, Markdown, links, or the raw HTTP response. Bulk and archives List, download, parse, and convert whole WARC, WAT, and WET files for a crawl. The columnar index Answer dataset-wide questions over the Parquet copy of the URL index with DuckDB or Athena. Building a dataset Load a slice of Common Crawl into a local DuckDB database and query it offline. Building a Markdown corpus Turn Common Crawl WARC files into a Markdown Parquet dataset on HuggingFace, from a single shard to a whole crawl. Host and domain ranks Look up harmonic-centrality and PageRank positions from the Common Crawl web graph. Host graph and enrichment Enumerate every host Common Crawl has seen, join in graph topology, and aggregate per-host CDX statistics. Building a recrawl engine What the crawl group does today: pick seed hosts from the web graph, run a resumable crawl that writes WARC, and see the tier budget. Scanning the news Work with the continuous CC-NEWS dataset, which has no URL index. Running the recrawl fleet Install ccrawl on three machines, run a shard of the work list on each under systemd, publish as it goes, and know what to do when one falls behind. Recrawl scheduling Score URLs by predicted change rate, diff two CDX snapshots to find what has changed, and assign crawl priorities. Building a search index Build a local BM25 inverted index over a page corpus and rank it, and know where the ceiling is. Content signals Extract text, score quality, identify language, and map outlinks, for one URL or for a list of them. API server Serve a local index and the host graph over HTTP, on loopback, for your own use.