Parallel Web Spiders for Cooperative Information Gathering

Abstract. Web spider is a widely used approach to obtain information for search engines. As the size of the Web grows, it becomes a natural choice to parallelize the spider’s crawling process. This paper presents a parallel web spider model based on multi-agent system for cooperative information gathering. It uses the dynamic assignment mechanism to wipe off redundant web pages caused by parallelization. Experiments show that the parallel spider is effective to improve the information gathering performance within an acceptable interaction efficiency cost for controlling. This approach provides a novel perspective for the next generation advanced search engine.