How hard is it really to have your own webcrawlers and index? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by MrOtingocni@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

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With the frustrations from using the usual search engines growing I've been thinking about this a lot lately.

It seems we've poisoned the well by allowing the proliferation of advertising interests to dominate the web.

Like how hard would it be to make your own non-commercial index?

Only human made sites that aren't related to buying, selling, marketing, etc.

Could that be a federated open-source project?

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[-] moonshine69 12 points 1 month ago

The index (i.e just the list of urls) of common crawl is 250gb. The actual crawl is 500tb ish. Then pull out just the text you get down to 30tb ish. And then you need that all to be in a fts index.. (something like opensearch/elasticsearch) idk how big the cluster you would need for that is.. maybe 2tb per data node max. So 15 pretty beefy vms (8cpu w/64gb memory) with 2tb nvme for data and a few more as controller nodes

Common crawl numbers pulled from this paper

https://aclanthology.org/anthology-files/anthology-files/pdf/L/L18/L18-1286.pdf

Cluster sizing numbers pulled from tea leaf divination

[-] MrOtingocni@lemmy.world 3 points 1 month ago

Thanks for providing that!

Not for the faint of heart resource-wise, but doesn't sound impossible for a dedicated group.

[-] moonshine69 5 points 1 month ago

Oops, realized I didn't answer your question about actually crawling, dig into common crawl documentation, they provide a bunch of technical data and stats that show you the scale..2-4billion pages per month

And note CC just does a sample of the pages it finds. So the more monthly dumps don't contain all of the data afaik

And the number above are for one of the monthly dumps

https://commoncrawl.github.io/cc-crawl-statistics/plots/crawlermetrics

this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2026

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