Web Crawler Sitemap Rate Control for Indexing Resource Balance
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Solution Overview
Problem
Search engines face challenges in managing crawl rates during high traffic periods, leading to network resource depletion and potential website accessibility issues, while insufficient crawling can result in incomplete indexing.
Innovation Solution
A web server generates sitemaps that include crawl rate information, allowing website owners to control the crawl rate by specifying preferred times and intervals, thereby optimizing the scheduling of web crawlers to conserve network resources and ensure comprehensive indexing.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If web crawlers increase crawling frequency to ensure comprehensive indexing, then indexing completeness is improved, but network resources are depleted and website accessibility deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The system dynamically adjusts crawl rates based on website-specific parameters and real-time conditions. Website owners can configure different crawl frequencies for different pages, and the system adapts these rates to balance indexing needs with network resource consumption, preventing both over-crawling and under-crawling scenarios.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent introduces crawl rate parameters that can be modified based on website characteristics, traffic conditions, and resource availability. By changing these parameters dynamically, the system optimizes the trade-off between indexing completeness and network resource usage, allowing comprehensive indexing during low-traffic periods while conserving resources during high-traffic periods.
2Reliability
If web crawlers increase crawling frequency to maintain up-to-date indexing, then indexing freshness is improved, but website accessibility and user experience deteriorate
Solution Approach 1:
The system applies different crawl rates to different websites and different pages within websites based on their specific characteristics, importance, and current conditions. Critical pages can be crawled more frequently while less important pages are crawled less frequently, maintaining indexing freshness for essential content while minimizing impact on website accessibility.
Solution Approach 2:
The system implements periodic crawling schedules that adjust based on website updates and traffic patterns. Instead of continuous high-frequency crawling, the system uses optimized periodic intervals that ensure indexing freshness while allowing website servers to handle user traffic without excessive crawl requests interfering with accessibility.
3Productivity
If web crawlers operate at high speed to improve productivity, then crawling efficiency is improved, but network resource consumption increases and causes congestion
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs partial crawling actions by selectively crawling only the most important pages and adjusting crawl rates based on priority. Instead of uniformly high-speed crawling of all pages, the system concentrates resources on critical content while reducing or skipping less important pages, maintaining overall productivity while reducing total network resource consumption.
Data Source
AI summary
Web crawlers crawl websites to access documents of the website for purposes of indexing the documents for search engines. The web crawlers crawl a specified website at a crawl rate that is based on multiple factors. One of the factors is a pre-set crawl rate limit. According to certain embodiments, an owner for a specified website is enabled to modify the crawl rate limit for the specified website when one or more pre-set criteria are met.