Acknowledgements

2 In this report we will outline the relevant background research, the design, the implementation and the evaluation of a distributed web crawler. Our system is innovative in that it assigns Euclidean coordinates to crawlers and web servers such that the distances in the space give an accurate prediction of download times. We will demonstrate that our method gives the crawler the ability to adapt and compensate for changes in the underlying network topology, and in doing so can achieve significant decreases in download times when compared with other approaches. 3