Common Crawl is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization that crawls the web and freely provides its archives and datasets to the public.[1][2] Common Crawl's web archive consists of petabytes of data collected since 2008.[3] It completes crawls generally every month.[4]
| Type of business | 501(c)(3) non-profit |
|---|---|
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California; Los Angeles, California, United States |
| Founder(s) | Gil Elbaz |
| Key people | Peter Norvig, Nova Spivack, Carl Malamud, Kurt Bollacker, Joi Ito |
| URL | commoncrawl |
Common Crawl was founded by Gil Elbaz.[5] Advisors to the non-profit include Peter Norvig and Joi Ito.[6] The organization's crawlers respect nofollow and robots.txt policies. Open source code for processing Common Crawl's data set is publicly available.
The Common Crawl dataset includes copyrighted work and is distributed from the US under fair use claims. Researchers in other countries have made use of techniques such as shuffling sentences or referencing the common crawl dataset to work around copyright law in other legal jurisdictions.[7]
As of March 2023, in the most recent version of the Common Crawl dataset, 46% of documents had English as their primary language (followed by Russian, German, Chinese, Japanese, French and Spanish, all below 6%).[8]
History
Amazon Web Services began hosting Common Crawl's archive through its Public Data Sets program in 2012.[9]
The organization began releasing metadata files and the text output of the crawlers alongside .arc files in July of that year.[10] Common Crawl's archives had only included .arc files previously.[10]
In December 2012, blekko donated to Common Crawl search engine metadata blekko gathered from crawls it conducted from February to October 2012.[11] The donated data helped Common Crawl "improve its crawl while avoiding spam, porn and the influence of excessive SEO."[11]
In 2013, Common Crawl began using Apache Software Foundation's Nutch webcrawler instead of a custom crawler.[12] Common Crawl switched from using .arc files to .warc files with its November 2013 crawl.[13]
A filtered version of Common Crawl was used to train OpenAI's GPT-3 language model, announced in 2020.[14]
Timeline of Common Crawl data
The following data have been collected from the official Common Crawl Blog.[15]
| Crawl date | Size in TiB | Billions of pages | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|
| October 2022 | 380 | 3.15 | Crawl conducted in September and October 2022 |
| April 2021 | 320 | 3.1 | |
| November 2018 | 220 | 2.6 | |
| October 2018 | 240 | 3.0 | |
| September 2018 | 220 | 2.8 | |
| August 2018 | — | — | |
| July 2018 | 255 | 3.25 | |
| June 2018 | 235 | 3.05 | |
| May 2018 | 215 | 2.75 | |
| April 2018 | 230 | 3.1 | |
| March 2018 | 250 | 3.2 | |
| February 2018 | 270 | 3.4 | |
| January 2018 | 270 | 3.4 | |
| December 2017 | 240 | 2.9 | |
| November 2017 | 260 | 3.2 | |
| October 2017 | 300 | 3.65 | |
| September 2017 | 250 | 3.01 | |
| August 2017 | 280 | 3.28 | |
| July 2017 | 240 | 2.89 | |
| June 2017 | 260 | 3.16 | |
| May 2017 | 250 | 2.96 | |
| April 2017 | 250 | 2.94 | |
| March 2017 | 250 | 3.07 | |
| February 2017 | 250 | 3.08 | |
| January 2017 | 250 | 3.14 | |
| December 2016 | — | 2.85 | |
| October 2016 | — | 3.25 | |
| September 2016 | — | 1.72 | |
| August 2016 | — | 1.61 | |
| July 2016 | — | 1.73 | |
| June 2016 | — | 1.23 | |
| May 2016 | — | 1.46 | |
| April 2016 | — | 1.33 | |
| February 2016 | — | 1.73 | |
| November 2015 | 151 | 1.82 | |
| September 2015 | 106 | 1.32 | |
| August 2015 | 149 | 1.84 | |
| July 2015 | 145 | 1.81 | |
| June 2015 | 131 | 1.67 | |
| May 2015 | 159 | 2.05 | |
| April 2015 | 168 | 2.11 | |
| March 2015 | 124 | 1.64 | |
| February 2015 | 145 | 1.9 | |
| January 2015 | 139 | 1.82 | |
| December 2014 | 160 | 2.08 | |
| November 2014 | 135 | 1.95 | |
| October 2014 | 254 | 3.7 | |
| September 2014 | 220 | 2.8 | |
| August 2014 | 200 | 2.8 | |
| July 2014 | 266 | 3.6 | |
| April 2014 | 183 | 2.6 | |
| March 2014 | 223 | 2.8 | First Nutch crawl |
| January 2014 | 148 | 2.3 | Crawls performed monthly |
| November 2013 | 102 | 2 | Data in Warc file format |
| July 2012 | — | — | Data in Arc file format |
| January 2012 | — | — | Public Data Set of Amazon Web Services |
| November 2011 | 40 | 5 | First availability on Amazon |
Norvig Web Data Science Award
In corroboration with SURFsara, Common Crawl sponsors the Norvig Web Data Science Award, a competition open to students and researchers in Benelux.[16][17] The award is named for Peter Norvig who also chairs the judging committee for the award.[16]
Google Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus
Google's version of the Common Crawl is called the Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus, or C4 for short.[18][19]
References
- ^ Rosanna Xia (February 5, 2012). "Tech entrepreneur Gil Elbaz made it big in L.A." Los Angeles Times. Retrieved July 31, 2014.
- ^ "Gil Elbaz and Common Crawl". NBC News. April 4, 2013. Retrieved July 31, 2014.
- ^ "So you're ready to get started". Common Crawl. Retrieved 9 June 2023.
- ^ Lisa Green (January 8, 2014). "Winter 2013 Crawl Data Now Available". Retrieved June 2, 2018.
- ^ "Startups - Gil Elbaz and Nova Spivack of Common Crawl - TWiST #222". This Week In Startups. January 10, 2012.
- ^ Tom Simonite (January 23, 2013). "A Free Database of the Entire Web May Spawn the Next Google". MIT Technology Review. Retrieved July 31, 2014.
- ^ Schäfer, Roland (May 2016). "CommonCOW: Massively Huge Web Corpora from CommonCrawl Data and a Method to Distribute them Freely under Restrictive EU Copyright Laws". Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16). Portorož, Slovenia: European Language Resources Association (ELRA): 4501.
- ^ "Statistics of Common Crawl Monthly Archives by commoncrawl". commoncrawl.github.io. Retrieved 2023-04-02.
- ^ Jennifer Zaino (March 13, 2012). "Common Crawl To Add New Data In Amazon Web Services Bucket". Semantic Web. Archived from the original on July 1, 2014. Retrieved July 31, 2014.
- ^ a b Jennifer Zaino (July 16, 2012). "Common Crawl Corpus Update Makes Web Crawl Data More Efficient, Approachable For Users To Explore". Semantic Web. Archived from the original on August 12, 2014. Retrieved July 31, 2014.
- ^ a b Jennifer Zaino (December 18, 2012). "Blekko Data Donation Is A Big Benefit To Common Crawl". Semantic Web. Archived from the original on August 12, 2014. Retrieved July 31, 2014.
- ^ Jordan Mendelson (February 20, 2014). "Common Crawl's Move to Nutch". Common Crawl. Retrieved July 31, 2014.
- ^ Jordan Mendelson (November 27, 2013). "New Crawl Data Available!". Common Crawl. Retrieved July 31, 2014.
- ^ Brown, Tom; Mann, Benjamin; Ryder, Nick; Subbiah, Melanie; Kaplan, Jared; Dhariwal, Prafulla; Neelakantan, Arvind; Shyam, Pranav; Sastry, Girish; Askell, Amanda; Agarwal, Sandhini (2020-06-01). "Language Models are Few-Shot Learners". p. 14. arXiv:2005.14165 [cs.CL].
the majority of our data is derived from raw Common Crawl with only quality-based filtering.
- ^ "Blog – Common Crawl".
- ^ a b Lisa Green (November 15, 2012). "The Norvig Web Data Science Award". Common Crawl. Retrieved July 31, 2014.
- ^ "Norvig Web Data Science Award 2014". Dutch Techcentre for Life Sciences. Archived from the original on August 15, 2014. Retrieved July 31, 2014.
- ^ "Google achieves state-of-the-art NLP performance with an enormous language model and data set". VentureBeat. 2019-10-24. Retrieved 2023-04-21.
- ^ Hern, Alex; editor, Alex Hern UK technology (2023-04-20). "Fresh concerns raised over sources of training material for AI systems". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 2023-04-21.
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External links
- Common Crawl in California, United States
- Common Crawl GitHub Repository with the crawler, libraries and example code
- Common Crawl Discussion Group
- Common Crawl Blog