Graph-based seed selection for web-scale crawlers
Shuyi Zheng, Pavel Dmitriev, Clyde Lee Giles · 2009
One of the most important steps in web crawling is determining the starting points, or seed selection. This paper identifies and explores the problem of seed selection in web-scale incremental crawlers. We argue that seed selection is not a trivial but very important problem. Selecting proper seeds can increase the number of pages a crawler will discover, and can result in a repository with more "good" and less "bad" pages. We propose a graph-based framework for crawler seed selection, and present several algorithms within this framework. Evaluation on real web data showed significant improvements over heuristic seed selection approaches.