WebSPHINX:

A Personal, Customizable Web Crawler

 

 

Contents

• (latest release v0.5, July
  8, 2002; see )

WebSPHINX ( Website-Specific Processors for HTML

INformation eXtraction) is a Java class library and interactive

development environment for web crawlers. A web crawler (also called a

robot or spider) is a program that browses and processes Web pages automatically.

WebSPHINX consists of two parts: the Crawler Workbench and the WebSPHINX

class library.

Crawler Workbench

The Crawler Workbench is a graphical user interface that lets you configure

and control a customizable web crawler. Using the Crawler Workbench, you

can:

• Visualize a collection of web pages as a graph
• Save pages to your local disk for offline browsing
• Concatenate pages together for viewing or printing
  them as a single document
• Extract all text matching a certain pattern from
  a collection of pages.
• Develop a custom crawler in Java or Javascript that
  processes pages however you want.

WebSPHINX class library

The WebSPHINX class library provides support for writing web crawlers

in Java. The class library offers a number of features:

• Multithreaded Web page retrieval in a simple
  application framework
• An object model that explicitly represents pages
  and links
• Support for reusable page content classifiers
• Tolerant HTML parsing
• Support for the robot exclusion standard
• Pattern matching, including regular expressions,
  Unix shell wildcards, and HTML tag expressions. Regular
  expressions are provided by the Apache jakarta-regexp regular expression
  library.
• Common HTML transformations , such as concatenating
  pages , saving pages to disk, and renaming links

First, you need Java 1.2 or later installed on your computer. If you're

not sure, try running java -version. If you need to install Java

on Windows, Linux, or Solaris, go directly to ; for other platforms, consult

the list of .

If your computer has AFS access, run java -jar /afs/cs.cmu.edu/user/rcm/www/websphinx/websphinx.jar

If you don't have AFS, you'll need to download this JAR file:

and then run java -jar websphinx.jar

The Crawler Workbench will appear in a new window.

Examples

Here are some things to try in the Workbench.

Visualize part of the Web as a graph

This crawler retrieves the pages

you've been reading and renders them as a graph of pages and links.

Crawl	the subtree
URL	http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rcm/websphinx
Action	none

 

 

 

Save pages to disk

This crawler retrieves the , which consists of about 30 pages, and saves it to a directory

on your local disk.

 

Crawl	the subtree
URL	http://reports-archive.adm.cs.cmu.edu/cs.html
Action	save
Directory	./scs-techreports

 

 

 

Concatenate pages for printing

This crawler concatenates all the pages in Bob Harper's into

a single massive page, suitable for printing.

Crawl	the subtree
URL	http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/introsml/
Action	concatenate
File	./intro-sml.html

 

 

Extract images from a set of pages

This crawler surfs over a few pages of logos and generates

a new page containing all the logos found.

Crawl	the subtree
URL	http://sunsite.unc.edu/Dave/logos.htm
Action	extract
Pattern	<a>(?{logo}<img>)<p>(?{caption})</a>
File	./dr-fun.html

 

 

 

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is WebSPHINX intended for?

WebSPHINX is designed for advanced web users and Java programmers who

want to crawl over a small part of the web (such as a single web site)

automatically.

Can I get the source code?

Yes, WebSPHINX is open source, covered by an Apache-style license (see

).

Where can I find documentation or examples for programming WebSPHINX

crawlers in Java?

Some examples can be found in our WWW7 paper (see ), and JavaDoc API documentation for the

class library is also available (see ).

Can I use WebSPHINX to crawl the entire Web, like search engines

do?

WebSPHINX isn't designed for enormous crawls like that. Search engines

typically use distributed crawlers running on farms of PCs with a fat

network pipe and a distributed filesystem or database for managing the

crawl frontier and storing page data.  WebSPHINX is intended more

for personal use, to crawl perhaps a hundred or a thousand web pages.  If

you want to use WebSPHINX for large crawls, you should definitely read

the next question about memory usage.

My WebSPHINX crawler is running out of RAM.  How can I control

its memory use?

By default, WebSPHINX retains all the pages and links that it has

crawled until you clear the crawler.  This can use up memory quickly,

especially if you're crawling more than a few hundred pages.  Here

are some tricks for changing the defaults and keeping memory under control.

 (Note that these tricks only apply when you're writing your own

crawler in Java, not when you're using the Crawler Workbench.)

 

1. Use Page.discardContent()
   to throw away (stop referencing) a page's content when you're done with
   it, so that it can be reclaimed by the garbage collector. This method preserves
   the page's array of outgoing Links, however, so you'll still have the
   crawl graph if you need it.
2. Disconnect the crawl graph entirely by
   breaking references between links and pages, so that every Page and Link
   object can be reclaimed once the crawler has finished visiting this. To
   do this, call page.getOrigin().setPage(null) whenever you're done processing
   a page.
3. Another kind of memory bloat is caused
   by the implementation of   java.lang.String.substring().  Calling
   s.substring() does not make a copy of the characters in the substring.
    Instead, it returns a special String that points to the substring
   within s. As a result, if you use substring() to grab a short part of a
   10KB web page, you're keeping a reference to the whole 10KB.  If you
   need to call substring() on page content and want to keep the substring
   around but not the original page, you should make a copy of the substring
   using new String (s.toCharArray()).
4. If all else fails, and you're using the
   Sun JDK, you can use the -mx option (called -Xmx in recent JDKs) to increase
   the maximum limit of heap memory.

The WWW7 paper mentions a "CategoryClassifier", but I can't find

it in the source code.  Where can I get it?

The CategoryClassifier was part of an earlier web-crawling system,

SPHINX, developed at Compaq SRC.  The original SPHINX code belongs

to Compaq SRC and was never released.  WebSPHINX is an open-source

reimplementation of the SPHINX interface.  CategoryClassifier was

not part of this reimplementation because CategoryClassifier depended on

some other software that belongs to SRC.

The search engine classifiers don't work.

Most of the search engine classifiers were written in 1998.  Search

engines have changed the format of their results many times since then,

so the classifiers are out of date.

My web crawler needs to use a web proxy, user authentication,

cookies, a special user-agent, etc. What do I do?

WebSPHINX uses the built-in Java classes URL and URLConnection to

fetch web pages.  If you're running the Crawler Workbench inside

a browser, that means your crawler uses the proxy, authentication, cookies,

and user-agent of the browser, so if you can visit the site manually,

then you can crawl it.  If you're running your crawler from the command

line, however, you'll have to configure Java to set up your proxy, authentication,

user-agents, and so forth.

The crawler library is open source, licensed under an . The latest release is

version 0.5, released on July 8, 2002. See the to find out what's new.

Download the source code here:

 

 

WebSPHINX is Copyright © 1998-2002 - Carnegie Mellon University.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification,

are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice,

this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.

2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright

notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation

and/or other materials provided with the distribution.

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY ``AS IS'' AND 

ANY EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE

IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE

ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY NOR ITS EMPLOYEES

BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL

DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS

OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER

CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY,

OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE

USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

This product includes software developed by the (http://www.apache.org/).

 In particular, WebSPHINX includes the regular

expression library, version 1.2. The (unmodified) source code for this

library is included in the WebSPHINX source code. Redistribution is allowed

under the terms of the .

 

 

(generated

by Javadoc)

For offline access to the API documentation, download:

WebSPHINX was inspired by an earlier system, SPHINX, developed over

summer 1997 at (then part of Digital). For more information

about SPHINX, see the paper:

Robert C. Miller and Krishna Bharat. . In Proceedings of

WWW7, Brisbane Australia, April 1998.

WebSPHINX is a ground-up reimplementation of the SPHINX interface, but

some features described in the paper were omitted in the reimplementation

(namely, the category classifier).

Some other projects are using WebSPHINX:

• (Lee Rossey, UPenn)

A few Java toolkits worthy of mention:

• is an HTTP
  proxy with an elegant extension mechanism for writing your own proxy
  filters. Great for anonymizing, cookie-blocking, ad-busting, and
  customizing your view of the Web. Open source, implemented in Java.

There are several crawling toolkits with goals similar to WebSPHINX.

• is an elegant, single-threaded Java web crawler implemented as an
  Enumeration. Open source.
• is a scripting
  language for the Web, with primitive functions for getting web pages
  and posting forms, and a built-in structured pattern language for
  matching HTML and XML. Open source, implemented in Java.
• is a Java toolkit
  for developing web crawlers. Commercial, closed source.
• (formerly known
  as WebCutter) is a Java web crawler designed specifically for web
  visualization. Closed source.
• is a web
  crawling environment using Basic. Runs only on Microsoft Windows.
  Commercial, closed source.

Several web sites, and even a few books, describe the crawlers and

robots that already roam the Web:

• Internet Agents:
  Spiders, Wanderers, Brokers, and Bots by Fah-Chun Cheong.
• Bots and Other
  Internet Beasties by Joseph Williams

Crawler writers should be aware of robot ethics:

•  
• David Eichmann,
  .
•