crawlertools

Crawlertools is a term used to describe a family of open-source software tools and libraries intended to support web crawling, data extraction, and content archival. Rather than referring to a single unified project, crawlertools typically denotes modular components that can be combined to build custom crawlers, scrapers, or indexers. In practice, projects bearing or using the name provide functionality for scheduling URLs, managing politeness and concurrency, performing HTTP requests, parsing pages, extracting structured data, and storing results.

Core components commonly found in crawlertools ecosystems include a URL queue or frontier, a rate limiter and politeness policy, an asynchronous or multi-threaded crawler engine, pluggable parsers or selectors, extractors for structured data, and pluggable storage backends (such as databases, search indexes, or flat files). Many implementations expose pipelines that transform, clean, and export results to formats like JSON, CSV, or JSON Lines, and offer tooling for logging, retry policies, and error handling. Some projects include built-in deduplication, depth and domain controls, and support for proxies or user-agent rotation.

Use cases range from general-purpose search engine crawling to price monitoring, content archiving, and research data collection. Because crawlertools can refer to multiple independent projects with varying licenses and maturity, users should consult the specific repository or package documentation to determine compatibility, licensing, and installation requirements.