Spider Web Crawler & Scraper
The Spider Web Crawler & Scraper component provides advanced web crawling capabilities with comprehensive scraping functionality. It systematically navigates through websites, discovering and following links while extracting structured data from pages it visits, enabling thorough web content collection.
Spider Web Crawler & Scraper interface
Component Inputs
- Spider API Key: Authentication key for the spider service
Required for accessing the crawling and scraping service
- URL: Starting URL for the crawler
The initial web address where crawling begins
- Limit: Maximum number of URLs to process
Controls the scope of the crawling operation
- Depth: Maximum crawl depth from initial URL
Determines how many link levels to traverse
- Blacklist: URLs or patterns to exclude
Websites or URL patterns to ignore during crawling
- Use Readability: Apply readability algorithms to extracted content
Improves content quality by filtering non-content elements
- Request Timeout: Maximum time for each request
Controls the timeout period for web requests
- Metadata: Include metadata from crawled pages
Option to include page metadata in results
Component Outputs
- Markdown: Crawled content formatted as markdown
Use Cases
- Website Archiving: Create comprehensive archives of entire websites
- Content Migration: Systematically extract content for migration to new platforms
- Knowledge Base Creation: Build knowledge bases from website content
- SEO Analysis: Analyze website structure and content relationships
- Competitive Research: Gather comprehensive information about competitor websites
- Documentation Extraction: Extract and organize documentation from websites
Best Practices
- Respect robots.txt directives and website terms of service
- Implement appropriate crawl rate limits to avoid overloading servers
- Use reasonable depth and limit settings to control crawl scope
- Apply blacklist filters to avoid irrelevant or restricted areas
- Enable readability processing for cleaner content extraction
- Set sensible request timeouts to handle various server response times
- Consider legal and ethical implications of web crawling activities
- Store intermediate results during large crawling operations
- Implement proper error handling for crawling and scraping failures