Abot: An Advanced Open-Source Web Crawler Engine for Everyone
Abot is an advanced open-source web crawler engine designed and developed in C#. Available in GitHub, the project aims to offer a free and open platform for users to retrieve and download web data with ease. Today, as the digital world continues to expand exponentially, retrieving specific content from the vast expanse of the internet has become a daunting task. Here is where Abot steps in, with its high-speed and easy to use web crawling capabilities.
Project Overview:
Abot serves to navigate through the web, page by page, and crawls according to the users' needs. This .NET Framework-based web crawler's primary goal is to allow individuals, programmers and companies to efficiently extract large quantities of data from websites without incurring significant cost or effort. The target audience for Abot includes SEO professionals, data analysts, researchers, and web developers who are frequently engaged in data mining and web scraping activities.
Project Features:
Abot offers a plethora of features, including scheduling and prioritizing crawled pages, page level control over the crawl process, and configuring various crawl settings as per needs. It also allows users to save bandwidth by compressing pages, and even offers pluggable components for easy customization. One of the strongest points of Abot is its capability of distributed crawling, which enables the user to crawl multiple websites simultaneously, therefore, saving time and enhancing productivity.
Technology Stack:
Built on C# using the .NET Framework with a CLI interface, Abot is equipped with a comprehensive toolset. It relies on HtmlAgilityPack, a .NET library designed to ease HTML document processing, and employs various innovative techniques to optimize crawling. The PowerShell integration provides the user with more control over the crawling process, making it customizable to the users' specific needs.
Project Structure and Architecture:
Abot's architecture is made with functionality and ease of use in mind. It is comprised of several components or modules that interact with each other to accomplish the web crawling tasks. These components include the Scheduler, Page Requester, Content Extractor, and Crawl Decision Maker, each playing a vital role in the overall functionality of Abot.
