Ask HN: Open source focused crawler?
Is there an open source crawler/library that will recursively follow only links under a certain xpath and ignore the rest?
I don't want to do an exhaustive crawl of every single link, I want something that will only follow links under a main content area.
Comments
I highly recommend Scrapy (http://www.scrapy.org).
From their site:
Scrapy is a fast high-level screen scraping and web crawling framework, used to crawl websites and extract structured data from their pages. It can be used for a wide range of purposes, from data mining to monitoring and automated testing.
Check this out : http://commoncrawl.org/
Its not exactly what you are looking for but might help you.
Have you tried BeautifulSoup?