Web Crawling and Metadata with Python

Author: Andrew Montalenti
Date: 2012-10-26

How this was made

This document was created using Docutils/reStructuredText and S5.

Introduction to web crawling (using Scrapy) metadata extraction (using Schemato).

Meta Information

Me: I've been using Python for 10 years. I use Python full-time, and have for the last 3 years.

Startup: I'm co-founder/CTO of Parse.ly, a tech startup in the digital media space.

E-mail me: andrew@parsely.com

Follow me on Twitter: amontalenti

Connect on LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/andrewmontalenti

Parse.ly

What do we do?

How do we do it?

Crawler

"A computer program that browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner or in an orderly fashion."

Open source examples:

Web Data

40 billion pages on the Web today (Google)

Growing: size was "just" 15 billion in October 2010

"Deep Web" means it's even bigger

Crawling, Spidering, Scraping

These terms are almost synonymous, but sometimes have different meaning and connotations.

My take:

My first experience with crawlers

Parse.ly Reader: personalized news reader built in mid 2009

Crawled 500K web sources for content personalized to individual interests

First crawler was really dumb: based on RSS/Atom detection and feed fetching

Seeded from domains appearing on top aggregators like Google News

Technology: multiprocessing, Postgres, Solr

My current experience

Parse.ly shifted into web publisher analytics and APIs in 2010/2011

Upgrades: Scrapy, MongoDB, Redis, Solr, Celery

Parse.ly Network Stats

>200 top publishing domains (Quantcast top-10,000 sites)

>3B pageviews/month across network

>10M unique URLs in our index

>1TB of hot production data running in memory

Parse.ly Crawl Infrastructure

Have written 125 custom Scrapy crawlers with >10K of custom crawler code

(Not proud of this fact; more on this later)

Production environment in Rackspace Cloud; several worker nodes

Implementation and QA runs in Scrapy Cloud

Caching and retry strategy implemented atop Redis

Eventual storage in MongoDB, Solr

Implemented as Scrapy Components and Pipelines

Our Business

We're not in the crawling business.

We're in the analytics and APIs business.

Our Strategy

We aim to be the #1 technology partner for large-scale publishers.

Crawling: means to an end.

URLs => Structured Metadata.

Metadata Soup: Schema.org, rNews, OpenGraph, hNews, HTML5, ...

Parse.ly Demo Time!

Yay!

Reflections on Scaling Crawlers

You don't want to write your own crawler infrastructure from scratch.

TRUST ME.

Lots of hidden problems --

Abstractions: asynchronous network I/O (Twisted), data processing pipelines

HTTP/web: retries, throttling, backoff, concurrency, cookie/form handling

Infrastructure: crawling queues, health monitoring

Don't use Nutch, Heritrix

Didier and I tried to understand, and even customize, Nutch in the early days.

We love Lucene/Solr, so we figured it'd be a good fit.

But no -- it's a WORLD OF PAIN.

(They are for building search engines and archives -- not structured metadata.)

Use Scrapy

It's really Pythonic.

It's built on proven tools, like Twisted, w3lib, and lxml.

It's getting better and better.

Just trust me: use Scrapy.

Scrapy Overview

$ git clone git://github.com/scrapy/dirbot.git
$ cd dirbot
$ mkvirtualenv dirbot
$ pip install scrapy
$ pip install ipython
$ scrapy list
dmoz
$ scrapy crawl dmoz
[scrapy] INFO: Scrapy 0.16.0 started (bot: dirbot)
...

Example Output

[dmoz] DEBUG: Crawled (200) <GET http://dmoz.org/Comp.../Python/Resources/>
[dmoz] DEBUG: Crawled (200) <GET http://dmoz.org/Comp.../Python/Books/>
[dmoz] DEBUG: Scraped from <200 http://dmoz.org/Comp.../Python/Resources/>
            Website: name=[u'Top'] url=[u'/']
[dmoz] DEBUG: Scraped from <200 http://dmoz.org/Comp.../Python/Resources/>
            Website: name=[u'Computers'] url=[u'/Computers/']
[dmoz] DEBUG: Scraped from <200 http://dmoz.org/Comp.../Python/Resources/>
            Website: name=[u'Programming'] url=[u'/Computers/Programming/']
...
[dmoz] DEBUG: Scraped from <200 http://dmoz.org/.../Python/Books/>
    Website: name=[u'Text Processing in Python'] url=[u'http://gnosis.cx/TPiP/']

[dmoz] INFO: Spider closed (finished)

Links:

Spider Example

class DmozSpider(BaseSpider):
    name = "dmoz"
    allowed_domains = ["dmoz.org"]
    start_urls = [
        "http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Programming/Languages/Python/Books/",
        "http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Programming/Languages/Python/Resources/",
    ]

    def parse(self, response):
        hxs = HtmlXPathSelector(response)
        sites = hxs.select('//ul/li')
        items = []
        for site in sites:
            item = Website()
            item['name'] = site.select('a/text()').extract()
            item['url'] = site.select('a/@href').extract()
            item['description'] = site.select('text()').extract()
            items.append(item)
        return items

Live Demos!

Examples: DailyCaller.com, ArsTechnica.com

Item

from scrapy.item import Item, Field

class DbItem(Item):
    title = Field()
    link = Field()

DailyCaller: imperative style

from scrapy.spider import BaseSpider
from scrapy.selector import HtmlXPathSelector
from dirbot.items import DbItem

class DailycallerSpider(BaseSpider):
    name = "dailycaller.com"
    allowed_domains = ["dailycaller.com"]
    start_urls = ["http://dailycaller.com"]

    def parse(self, response):
        hxs = HtmlXPathSelector(response)
        item = DbItem()
        item["title"] = hxs.select("//h1/text()").extract()[0]
        item["link"] = hxs.select("//link[@rel='canonical']/@href").extract()[0]
        return item

ArsTechnica: declarative style

from scrapy.spider import BaseSpider
from scrapy.selector import HtmlXPathSelector
from dirbot.items import DbItem

from scrapy.contrib.loader import XPathItemLoader
from scrapy.contrib.loader.processor import TakeFirst

class ArstechnicaSpider(BaseSpider):
    name = "arstechnica.com"
    allowed_domains = ["arstechnica.com"]
    start_urls = ["http://arstechnica.com"]

    def parse(self, response):
        loader = XPathItemLoader(item=DbItem(), response=response)
        loader.add_xpath("title", "//meta/[@property='og:title']/@content")
        loader.add_xpath("link", "//link[@rel='canonical']/@href")
        item = loader.load_item()
        item["title"] = loader.get_value(item["title"], TakeFirst(), unicode.title)
        item["link"] = loader.get_value(item["link"], TakeFirst())
        return item

Live Spider Shell

>>> fetch("http://dailycaller.com/2012...-most-rallies/")
[dailycaller.com] INFO: Spider opened
[dailycaller.com] DEBUG: Crawled (200) <GET http://dailycaller.com/...ies/>
[s] Available Scrapy objects:
[s]   hxs        <HtmlXPathSelector xpath...>
[s]   item       Website: name=None url=None
[s]   request    <GET http://dailycaller.com/...es/>
[s]   response   <200 http://dailycaller.com/...es/>
[s]   settings   <CrawlerSettings module=<module 'dirbot.settings'>
[s]   spider     <DailycallerSpider 'dailycaller.com' at 0x2484d90>
[s] Useful shortcuts:
[s]   shelp()           Shell help
[s]   fetch(req_or_url) Fetch request (or URL) and update local objects
[s]   view(response)    View response in a browser
>>> hxs.select("//title/text()")

Scrapy Cloud Demo

How we host, test, and QA our spiders across millions of pages.

Schemato Overview

Domo arigato, Mr. Schemato!

Schemato Distilling

from distillers import Distill, Distiller
class NewsDistiller(Distiller):
    title = Distill("s:headline", "og:title")
    image_url = Distill("s:associatedMedia.ImageObject/url", "og:image")
    pub_date = Distill("s:datePublished")
    author = Distill("s:author", "s:creator.Person/name")
    section = Distill("s:articleSection")
    description = Distill("s:description", "og:description")
    link = Distill("s:url", "og:url")
    site = Distill("og:site_id")
    id = Distill("s:identifier")

Schemato Distilling in Action

>>> from distillery import NewsDistiller
>>> from schemato import Schemato
>>> lnk = "http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/26/world/europe/italy-berlusconi-convicted/index.html"
>>> cnn = Schemato(lnk)
>>> distiller = NewsDistiller(cnn)
>>> distiller.distill()
{'author': "Ben Wedeman",
'id': None,
'image_url': 'http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/...-video-tease.jpg',
'link': 'http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/26/world/europe/italy-berlusconi-convicted/index.html',
'pub_date': '2012-10-26T14:36:35Z',
'section': 'world',
'title': 'Ex-Italian PM Berlusconi handed 4-year prison term for tax fraud',
'site': 'CNN',
'description': 'Flamboyant former Italian Prime Minister...'}

Schemato: Bridging Gaps Between Standards

Facebook OpenGraph provided image_url and link.

Schema.org NewsArticle provided the rest.

>>> distiller.sources
{'author': 's:author',
'id': None,
'image_url': 'og:image',
'link': 'og:url',
'pub_date': 's:datePublished',
'section': 's:articleSection',
'title': 's:headline',
'site': 'og:site_id',
'description': 's:description'}

Data sets to get started

Are you interested in tackling some of these web crawling problems on your own project?

If so, you may want some data to get started.

I currently sell a few news data sets that help with this:

You could use either of these to build your own Google News, for example.

Interested? Find me after or tweet me: amontalenti

Schemato: A Call to Action

The time is ripe for the semantic web.

Want to build the ultimate web metadata validator, distiller, and extractor?

Want to work on getting Schemato to run across millions of URLs?

Want your contributions open source on Github?

Find me at the sprints on Sunday!

Baby Turtles

Use your powers wisely, and always remember...

img/babyturtles.png

Magic Turtles!

It's turtles all the way down!

img/magicturtle.jpg