đź“ą Chapter 9: How to Design a Web Crawler
🕸️ How to Design a Web Crawler | System Design Explained
Hey BrainBooster family! đź§
Welcome to Part 9 of our System Design series.
In this video, we’re exploring Chapter 9: Design a Web Crawler from System Design Interview: An Insider’s Guide by Alex Xu.
Have you ever wondered how Google finds and indexes billions of web pages? Or how scrapers pull data from thousands of websites in real-time?
The answer: Web Crawlers — and today, we’ll learn how to build one from the ground up.
Whether you’re preparing for a system design interview or working on your own search engine, this chapter is a goldmine.
✅ In this video, we’ll cover:
What is a web crawler and why is it important?
Core requirements: crawling, storing, and avoiding duplicates
Functional vs Non-functional requirements
How to respect robots.txt, rate limits, and domain throttling
Strategies for URL deduplication using bloom filters, hash sets, and canonicalization
Scalable architecture: multi-threaded crawling, task queues, and distributed workers
Data storage using databases and file systems
Techniques to prioritize important pages (like BFS, DFS, or PageRank-style scoring)
Handling challenges like infinite loops, broken links, and duplicate content
We’ll also walk through a real-world example:
Designing a crawler that visits millions of pages a day without breaking any website rules — and scaling it across multiple machines.
Whether you're building a mini crawler or an enterprise-grade search engine, this video will give you the foundational blueprint.
đź“š Book Mentioned
System Design Interview: An Insider’s Guide by Alex Xu
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Got questions? Ideas? Drop them in the comments below. Let’s learn and grow together!
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Thanks for watching, BrainBooster family! 🎯
See you in the next chapter!