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building a bot

suppose i want to build a web bot that will scan only the main pages of all websites in some country.
where do i start from?

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Onthrax

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Sasha-N

ASKER

so i dont need special hardware and i can just run it from home server?
how much time do you think will take to scan all the net domains?

Onthrax

Correct. Although I imagine it will take a long long time with only your own machine to spider ALL the net domains.

For example Google has many many server parks consisting of hundreds of computers in every country.

Sasha-N

ASKER

suppose i want to scan all the sites in russia- with .ru domain
will it take about a month? or about an year?

Onthrax

I really couldn't make an estimate m8. It all depends on a lot of factors.

For example:
- The method you will be using to spider domains. e.g. loop through all possible domains like a.ru, b.ru, ab.ru, abc.ru etc. or spider a few .ru sites and fetch links from those etc.
- The capacity of your machine. A pentium 1 would take longer than a powerfull Quad core.
- The bandwidth available and it's speed
- The size of the webpages you will be spidering. A single page with only a few words will be faster done than a site with a huge page and a lot of backpages.

Imagine google not having indexed the entire internet yet with all their machines. It's a huge job..