I love common crawl, but as I commented before I still want to see a subset available for download, something like the top million sites or something like that. Certainly a few steps of data, say 50GB 100GB and 200GB.
I really think a subset like this will increase the value as it would allow people writing search engines (for fun or profit) to suck a copy down locally and work away. Its something I would like to do for sure.
Ideally beyond the top sites, these subsets would be available as verticals, so that people can focus on specialized search engines.
While it's nice to have generalist search engines, it would be even better to be able to unbundle the generalist search engines completely. Verticals such as the following would be nice:
1) Everything linux, unix and both
2) Everything open-source
3) Only news & current events
4) Popular culture globally and by country
5) Politics globally and by country
6) Everything software engineering
7) Everything hardware engineering
8) Everything maker community
9) Everything financial markets
10) Everything medicine / health (sans obvious quackery)
11) etc.
Maybe make a tool that allows the community to create the subset creation recipes that perform the parsing out of data of a certain type and that the community forks and improves over time.
The time to create a generalist search engine has sailed, but specialist search engines is total greenfield.
You don't usually download this data - you process it on AWS to your requirements.
Seriously - they give you an easy way to create these subsets yourself[1]. That is a much better solution than them trying to anticipate the exact needs of every potential client.
I guess what I was suggesting is "given enough eyeballs, all spam and poor quality content is shallow"
There is definitely a benefit in using the community to identify valuable subsets and then individually putting your energy towards building discovery/search products around that subset.
would love to have even smaller subsets (like 5gb) that students can casually play around with too to practice and learn tools and algos :) (if it's not too much trouble!)
The text extracts and metadata files are generated off individual WARC files, so it is pretty easy to get the corresponding sets of files. For the above it would be:
Is there any way to get incrementals? It would be extremely valuable is to get the pages that were added/changed/deleted each day. Some kind of a daily feed of a more limited size.
Totally true. Smaller versions are not helpful for just casual/student use; it also helps in code development and debugging. Otherwise, algorithm development gets impeded by scaling issues.
I really think a subset like this will increase the value as it would allow people writing search engines (for fun or profit) to suck a copy down locally and work away. Its something I would like to do for sure.