AI Project 2

Name: Ojas Jayant Khawas

Class: TY-C
Roll No.:10
SRN No.:202100264
Title: Web Crawling and Page Indexing using Breadth First Search

1) Problem Statement and Objectives:

Problem Statement:

The problem statement revolves around developing a web crawling and page indexing system
using Breadth First Search (BFS) algorithm. The primary objective is to create a robust and
efficient system capable of systematically traversing the web, discovering web pages, and
indexing their content for search engine purposes. The system should be able to handle the
vastness and complexity of the web while ensuring timely and accurate indexing of web pages.

Implementation Plan:

Crawling Strategy Selection: Determine the scope and depth of web crawling, including the
selection of seed URLs, crawl depth, and domain restrictions. Define the strategy for handling
dynamic content, session IDs, and duplicate URLs.

Breadth First Search Algorithm: Implement the Breadth First Search algorithm to traverse the
web graph systematically. Begin with a set of seed URLs and iteratively explore neighboring
pages, ensuring breadth-first traversal.

URL Frontier Management: Develop mechanisms for managing the URL frontier, including
URL normalization, URL filtering, and URL deduplication. Implement data structures such as
queues or priority queues to efficiently manage the frontier.

Page Retrieval and Parsing: Develop modules for retrieving web pages using HTTP requests and
parsing their HTML content. Extract relevant information such as links, text content, metadata,
and structured data for indexing.

Content Indexing: Implement indexing mechanisms to store and organize crawled content
efficiently. Design data structures and algorithms for indexing web pages based on their content,
metadata, and relevance.
Duplicate Content Detection: Develop algorithms for detecting and handling duplicate content
across web pages. Implement techniques such as content fingerprinting, similarity hashing, and
canonicalization to identify and consolidate duplicate content.

Crawl Monitoring and Management: Implement monitoring tools and dashboards to track crawl
progress, identify errors, and manage system resources. Develop mechanisms for handling crawl
interruptions, retries, and resumption from checkpoints.

Scalability and Performance Optimization: Design the system for scalability to handle large-
scale web crawls efficiently. Implement parallelization, distributed computing, and load
balancing techniques to optimize performance and resource utilization.

Objectives:

1. Develop a web crawling and indexing system capable of systematically traversing the
web and discovering web pages.
2. Implement the Breadth First Search algorithm to ensure systematic and efficient
exploration of web pages.
3. Create mechanisms for managing the URL frontier, including URL normalization,
filtering, and deduplication.
4. Ensure compliance with website crawling policies, including robots.txt parsing and crawl
delay handling.
5. Retrieve web pages, parse their content, and extract relevant information for indexing.
6. Index web pages based on their content, metadata, and relevance, ensuring efficient
storage and organization.
7. Detect and handle duplicate content across web pages using advanced algorithms and
techniques.
8. Monitor crawl progress, manage system resources, and handle crawl interruptions
effectively.
9. Design the system for scalability and performance optimization to handle large-scale web
crawls efficiently.
10. Conduct comprehensive testing to ensure the reliability, correctness, and robustness of
the web crawling and indexing system.
2) Methodology details:

➢ Identify dataset:
For the project on web crawling and page indexing using Breadth First Search (BFS),
the first step is to identify a suitable dataset that will serve as the corpus for the web
crawling process. This dataset should ideally consist of a collection of web pages
representing diverse content relevant to the project's objectives. Depending on the
specific focus of the project, the dataset may include web pages from various domains
such as news articles, academic publications, blog posts, or any other type of online
content. The dataset selection process involves considering factors such as size,
diversity, and relevance to ensure comprehensive coverage of the web space during the
crawling and indexing stages.

➢ Preprocess dataset:
Once the dataset has been identified, the next step is to preprocess the data to make it
suitable for the web crawling and indexing process. Preprocessing tasks may include
removing duplicate pages, filtering out irrelevant content, normalizing text data, and
handling multimedia content such as images and videos. Additionally, data cleaning
techniques may be applied to address inconsistencies or errors in the dataset. The
preprocessing stage is crucial for ensuring the quality and consistency of the data before
it is fed into the web crawling algorithm for indexing.

➢ Implement algorithm:
With the dataset prepared, the next step is to implement the Breadth First Search (BFS)
algorithm for web crawling. This involves developing the necessary software
components to fetch web pages, extract relevant information, follow hyperlinks to
discover new pages, and systematically traverse the web graph in a breadth-first manner.
The implementation of the BFS algorithm should be robust, efficient, and capable of
handling various aspects of web crawling, including handling redirects, managing
crawling delays, and respecting robots.txt directives to ensure ethical and responsible
crawling practices.

➢ Verify output with expected output based on domain knowledge:

Following the implementation of the web crawling algorithm, it is essential to verify the
output against expected results based on domain knowledge and project requirements.
This verification process involves examining the crawled web pages, inspecting the
extracted content, and assessing the coverage and quality of the indexed data. Domain
experts may provide valuable insights during this stage to validate the relevance and
 accuracy of the crawled information, ensuring that it aligns with the objectives of the
project and meets the needs of potential users or applications.
➢ Validation and testing:
Finally, the entire web crawling and page indexing system undergoes validation and
testing to assess its performance, reliability, and scalability. This involves conducting
comprehensive testing procedures to identify and address any potential issues or
limitations in the system. Validation tests may include assessing the crawling speed,
evaluating the indexing efficiency, measuring the accuracy of search results, and stress-
testing the system under various conditions. Through rigorous validation and testing,
any shortcomings or bottlenecks in the web crawling and indexing process can be
identified and resolved, ultimately ensuring the robustness and effectiveness of the
implemented solution.

3) Source code:

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
from collections import deque

def crawl_and_index(seed_urls, max_pages=10):

visited_urls = set()
url_queue = deque(seed_urls)
index = {}

while url_queue and len(visited_urls) < max_pages:

url = url_queue.popleft()
if url in visited_urls:
continue

try:
response = requests.get(url)
if response.status_code == 200:
html_content = response.text
soup = BeautifulSoup(html_content, 'html.parser')

# Extract relevant information for indexing

# For example, extract text from <p> tags
text_content = ' '.join([p.get_text() for p in
soup.find_all('p')])
index[url] = text_content

# Extract links for BFS traversal

 links = [link.get('href') for link in soup.find_all('a') if
link.get('href')]
for link in links:
# Ensure absolute URLs for proper traversal
absolute_link = urljoin(url, link)
if absolute_link not in visited_urls:
url_queue.append(absolute_link)

# Mark the current URL as visited

visited_urls.add(url)

except Exception as e:
print(f"Error crawling {url}: {e}")

return index

# Example usage:
seed_urls = ['https://intellipaat.com/']
index = crawl_and_index(seed_urls, max_pages=10)
print(index)

4) Output screenshots:
5) Testing screenshots:

6) Observations

1. Methodology of BFS Web Crawling:

• BFS is a systematic approach to traversing or searching tree or graph data
structures layer by layer.
• In the context of web crawling, BFS starts from a specific URL (the root),
explores all links found on that page, then moves on to explore links on
subsequent pages discovered in a breadth-first manner.
• BFS ensures that all pages within a certain depth are crawled before moving
deeper into the website hierarchy.

2. Advantages:
• Comprehensive Coverage: BFS ensures that pages are crawled layer by layer,
which leads to comprehensive coverage of a website's content.
• Avoids Deep Nesting: BFS helps avoid getting trapped in deep levels of nesting,
which can happen in other crawling strategies like Depth First Search (DFS).
• Better Resource Management: Since BFS explores links in a breadth-first manner,
it can be more efficient in terms of resource usage compared to DFS.
3. Challenges:
• Storage Requirements: Storing all discovered URLs and their associated metadata
can require significant storage space, especially for large websites.
• Duplicate Content: BFS may encounter duplicate content across different URLs,
which needs to be handled to avoid indexing redundant information.
• Handling Dynamic Content: Websites with dynamically generated content or
session-based URLs may pose challenges in effectively crawling and indexing all
relevant content.

4. Potential Applications:
• Search Engine Indexing: Web crawling using BFS is fundamental to search
engine operations, enabling search engines to index web pages for later retrieval.
• Website Analysis: BFS crawling can be used to analyze website structures,
identify broken links, and assess website performance.
• Data Mining: BFS crawling can be employed for data mining purposes, extracting
specific types of information from websites for research or business intelligence.

5. Ethical Considerations:
• Respect for Robots.txt: Crawlers should adhere to rules specified in the website's
robots.txt file to respect the website owner's preferences regarding crawling.
• Politeness Policies: Crawlers should implement politeness policies such as
respecting crawl rate limits and avoiding overwhelming servers with too many
requests.

6. Scalability:
• BFS crawling can be scaled horizontally by distributing crawling tasks across
multiple nodes or machines, allowing for faster and more efficient crawling of
large-scale websites.

7) Conclusion:

In conclusion, Web Crawling and Page Indexing using Breadth First Search (BFS) offer a
systematic approach to exploring and indexing web content. BFS ensures comprehensive
coverage of a website's pages while avoiding deep nesting, leading to efficient resource
utilization. Despite challenges such as storage requirements and handling dynamic
content, BFS remains a vital tool for search engine indexing, website analysis, and data
mining. With scalability options enabling distributed crawling, BFS proves to be a
versatile solution for efficiently traversing and indexing the vast landscape of the World
Wide Web, facilitating access to valuable information for various research, business, and
analytical endeavors.