A Scalable Crawling Algorithm Utilizing Noisy Change-Indicating Signals

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Busa-Fekete, Róbert, Zimmert, Julian, György, András, Qiu, Linhai, Sung, Tzu-Wei, Shen, Hao, Choi, Hyomin, Subramaniam, Sharmila, Xiao, Li
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Busa-Fekete, Róbert
Zimmert, Julian
György, András
Qiu, Linhai
Sung, Tzu-Wei
Shen, Hao
Choi, Hyomin
Subramaniam, Sharmila
Xiao, Li
author_facet Busa-Fekete, Róbert
Zimmert, Julian
György, András
Qiu, Linhai
Sung, Tzu-Wei
Shen, Hao
Choi, Hyomin
Subramaniam, Sharmila
Xiao, Li
contents Web refresh crawling is the problem of keeping a cache of web pages fresh, that is, having the most recent copy available when a page is requested, given a limited bandwidth available to the crawler. Under the assumption that the change and request events, resp., to each web page follow independent Poisson processes, the optimal scheduling policy was derived by Azar et al. 2018. In this paper, we study an extension of this problem where side information indicating content changes, such as various types of web pings, for example, signals from sitemaps, content delivery networks, etc., is available. Incorporating such side information into the crawling policy is challenging, because (i) the signals can be noisy with false positive events and with missing change events; and (ii) the crawler should achieve a fair performance over web pages regardless of the quality of the side information, which might differ from web page to web page. We propose a scalable crawling algorithm which (i) uses the noisy side information in an optimal way under mild assumptions; (ii) can be deployed without heavy centralized computation; (iii) is able to crawl web pages at a constant total rate without spikes in the total bandwidth usage over any time interval, and automatically adapt to the new optimal solution when the total bandwidth changes without centralized computation. Experiments clearly demonstrate the versatility of our approach.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_02430
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Scalable Crawling Algorithm Utilizing Noisy Change-Indicating Signals
Busa-Fekete, Róbert
Zimmert, Julian
György, András
Qiu, Linhai
Sung, Tzu-Wei
Shen, Hao
Choi, Hyomin
Subramaniam, Sharmila
Xiao, Li
Machine Learning
Information Retrieval
Web refresh crawling is the problem of keeping a cache of web pages fresh, that is, having the most recent copy available when a page is requested, given a limited bandwidth available to the crawler. Under the assumption that the change and request events, resp., to each web page follow independent Poisson processes, the optimal scheduling policy was derived by Azar et al. 2018. In this paper, we study an extension of this problem where side information indicating content changes, such as various types of web pings, for example, signals from sitemaps, content delivery networks, etc., is available. Incorporating such side information into the crawling policy is challenging, because (i) the signals can be noisy with false positive events and with missing change events; and (ii) the crawler should achieve a fair performance over web pages regardless of the quality of the side information, which might differ from web page to web page. We propose a scalable crawling algorithm which (i) uses the noisy side information in an optimal way under mild assumptions; (ii) can be deployed without heavy centralized computation; (iii) is able to crawl web pages at a constant total rate without spikes in the total bandwidth usage over any time interval, and automatically adapt to the new optimal solution when the total bandwidth changes without centralized computation. Experiments clearly demonstrate the versatility of our approach.
title A Scalable Crawling Algorithm Utilizing Noisy Change-Indicating Signals
topic Machine Learning
Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.02430