What is GigaMirror?

GigaMirror is an open-source web crawler and archiver designed for large-scale collection and preservation of websites. It utilizes a distributed architecture to efficiently crawl and archive billions of web pages with minimal resource utilization.

Some key features of GigaMirror include:

• Scalable and distributed architecture based on Apache Kafka and Apache Storm, allowing it to handle a high volume of crawling traffic without getting overloaded
• Flexible and customizable crawling rules to determine which pages to crawl, how often, and other policies
• Deduplication of pages across multiple crawls to avoid storing duplicate content
• Automated monitoring and management dashboards to track crawling statistics and system health
• Resumable crawling so any interrupted crawls can be seamlessly resumed
• APIs and integrations with external systems for triggering and managing crawls programmatically

GigaMirror originated as a research project at Stanford University. It has since evolved into a mature platform adopted by organizations across academia, government, and industry for large-scale archival of web content for purposes ranging from digital preservation to big data analytics.

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