iRobot: an intelligent crawler for web forums

We study in this paper the Web forum crawling problem, which is a very fundamental step in many Web applications, such as search engine and Web data mining. As a typical user-created content (UCC), Web forum has become an important resource on the Web due to its rich information contributed by millions of Internet users every day. However, Web forum crawling is not a trivial problem due to the in-depth link structures, the large amount of duplicate pages, as well as many invalid pages caused by login failure issues. In this paper, we propose and build a prototype of an intelligent forum crawler, iRobot, which has intelligence to understand the content and the structure of a forum site, and then decide how to choose traversal paths among different kinds of pages. To do this, we first randomly sample (download) a few pages from the target forum site, and introduce the page content layout as the characteristics to group those pre-sampled pages and re-construct the forum's sitemap. A...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: WWW
• Authors: Rui Cai, Jiang-Ming Yang, Wei Lai, Yida Wang, Lei Zhang
• Keywords: Forum Crawling Problem, Internet Technology, Invalid Pages, Web Forum Crawling, WWW 2008