Aspire 3.3 (Willow)
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The Aspider Web Crawler connector will crawl content from any given website. 

Aspider is based on the Heritrix HTML Parser for links discovery, but relies on the Aspire 3 Connector Framework to handle connections and distributed crawls. See The Making of Aspider for more information.

Aspider is highly configurable and behaves better for intranet crawls in comparison to the Heritrix Crawler.


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Features

Some of the features of the Aspider Web Crawler connector include:

  • HTTP Authentication
    • Basic/Digest
    • NTLM
    • Negotiate/Kerberos
    • HTML forms (cookie-based)
    • Connection throttling
  • Incremental crawl
    • Ignore/Respect robots.txt and robots meta tags
  • Heritrix HTML parser for link extraction
    • Connection proxy
  • Configurable User agent
    • Max Crawl depth
  • Distributed crawling
      • Include/Exclude patterns
  • HTTPS crawling


Content Retrieved

The Aspider Web Crawler connector retrieves several types of documents. Listed below are some examples of documents retrieved by this crawler.

  • HTML pages
    • html, aspx, php, etc.
  • Scripts and stylesheets
    • js, css, etc.
  • Images
    • jpg, gif, png, etc.


This crawler will retrieve any document found linked in the HTML Markup as links (such as PDFs, MS Word, MS PowerPoint, etc).

Limitations 

Due to the design implementation, Aspider Web Crawler has the following limitations:

  • Dynamic generated markup
    • Any markup generated by the browser by executing a site's javascript will NOT be detected by the crawler, so dynamic links will not be discovered.


Anything we should add? Please let us know.


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