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Scalable, generic, and adaptive systems for focused crawling

Focused crawling is the process of exploring a graph iteratively, focusing on parts of the graph relevant to a given topic. It occurs in many situations such as a company collecting data on competition, a journalist surfing the Web to investigate a political scandal, or an archivist recording the activity of influential Twitter users during a presidential election. In all these applications, users explore a graph (e.g., the Web or a social network), nodes are discovered one by one, the total number of exploration steps is constrained, some nodes are more valuable than others, and the objective is to maximize the total value of the crawled subgraph. In this article, we introduce scalable, generic, and adaptive systems for focused crawling. Our first effort is to define an abstraction of focused crawling applicable to a large domain of real-world scenarios. We then propose a generic algorithm, which allows us to identify and optimize the relevant subsystems. We prove the intractability of finding an optimal exploration, even when all the information is available. Taking this intractability into account, we investigate how the crawler can be steered in several experimental graphs. We show the good performance of a greedy strategy and the importance of being able to run at each step a new estimation of the crawling frontier. We then discuss this estimation through heuristics, self-trained regression, and multi-armed bandits. Finally, we investigate their scalability and efficiency in different real-world scenarios and by comparing with state-of-the-art systems.