Run a high-fidelity browser-based web archiving crawler in a single Docker container
Webrecorder: Web Archiving for All
Webrecorder provides open source solutions for everyone to archive the complex, interactive Web.
ArchiveBox - Open-source self-hosted web archiving
Preserve websites, media, bookmarks, feeds, source code, evidence, and research material in durable files you control.
Solutions for Link Rot on the Modern Web
Web links are fundamental to the web, enabling navigation between pages and citations in research articles. However, web links suffer from "link rot", a phenomenon in which links are likely to become inaccessible over time. This can occur if a link’s site disappears, making it impossible to resolve the hostname or establish a server connection, or the linked page has been deleted, resulting in an HTTP 404 "Not Found" error. Today, a common solution to tackle link rot is to rely on web archives, which capture snapshots of web pages for future reference. However, the modern web has evolved significantly since web archives were first introduced, leading to several limitations in their effectiveness. First, the scale of the web has grown tremendously, making it infeasible to crawl every page whenever it changes. As a result, many broken links either have no archived copies, or the archived copies have stale content. Second, modern web pages rely heavily on increasingly complex and diverse JavaScript. This shift has made it more challenging for preserving fidelity in archived copies, significantly increasing both the computational cost of operating browser-based crawlers and engineering effort required to maintain accurate replay systems. This thesis presents a set of solutions to cope with link rot on the modern web. My work aims to mitigate the various limitations of web archives. First, for broken links without any archived copy, or if the archived copy includes stale content or unavailable functionalities, I built Fable. Fable revives the dead link with the new URL to the same page whenever available. Compared to prior approaches, Fable revives 4.6K broken links—a 50% increase—with much higher accuracy. Second, for pages that require dynamic crawling, I show how web archives can achieve a better tradeoff between efficiency and fidelity. By carefully choosing 8.9% of pages to crawl dynamically and strategically reusing resources from those crawls, an archive can serve 99% of the remaining statically crawled pages without any fidelity loss. Third, for fidelity violations in archived copies that are caused by incorrect edits to crawled scripts, I built FidEx. FidEx reliably detects when an archived page differs from its original version and pinpoints the root cause. After fixing the most common errors pinpointed by FidEx, I reduced the fraction of pages for which FidEx reports a violation of fidelity from 15% to 9%.
Solutions for Link Rot on the Modern Web
Web links are fundamental to the web, enabling navigation between pages and citations in research articles. However, web links suffer from "link rot", a phenomenon in which links are likely to become inaccessible over time. This can occur if a link’s site disappears, making it impossible to resolve the hostname or establish a server connection, or the linked page has been deleted, resulting in an HTTP 404 "Not Found" error. Today, a common solution to tackle link rot is to rely on web archives, which capture snapshots of web pages for future reference. However, the modern web has evolved significantly since web archives were first introduced, leading to several limitations in their effectiveness. First, the scale of the web has grown tremendously, making it infeasible to crawl every page whenever it changes. As a result, many broken links either have no archived copies, or the archived copies have stale content. Second, modern web pages rely heavily on increasingly complex and diverse JavaScript. This shift has made it more challenging for preserving fidelity in archived copies, significantly increasing both the computational cost of operating browser-based crawlers and engineering effort required to maintain accurate replay systems. This thesis presents a set of solutions to cope with link rot on the modern web. My work aims to mitigate the various limitations of web archives. First, for broken links without any archived copy, or if the archived copy includes stale content or unavailable functionalities, I built Fable. Fable revives the dead link with the new URL to the same page whenever available. Compared to prior approaches, Fable revives 4.6K broken links—a 50% increase—with much higher accuracy. Second, for pages that require dynamic crawling, I show how web archives can achieve a better tradeoff between efficiency and fidelity. By carefully choosing 8.9% of pages to crawl dynamically and strategically reusing resources from those crawls, an archive can serve 99% of the remaining statically crawled pages without any fidelity loss. Third, for fidelity violations in archived copies that are caused by incorrect edits to crawled scripts, I built FidEx. FidEx reliably detects when an archived page differs from its original version and pinpoints the root cause. After fixing the most common errors pinpointed by FidEx, I reduced the fraction of pages for which FidEx reports a violation of fidelity from 15% to 9%.
Archiving URLs
Archiving the Web, because nothing lasts forever: statistics, online archive services, extracting URLs automatically from browsers, and creating a daemon to regularly back up URLs to multiple sources.
Common Crawl - Open Repository of Web Crawl Data
We build and maintain an open repository of web crawl data that can be accessed and analyzed by anyone.
GitHub - webrecorder/warcio: Streaming WARC/ARC library for fast web archive IO
Streaming WARC/ARC library for fast web archive IO - webrecorder/warcio
Apptainer - Portable, Reproducible Containers
Apptainer is an open source container platform designed to run complex applications on high-performance computing (HPC) clusters in a simple, portable, and reproducible way.
Self-host and scale web apps without Kubernetes complexity | Uncloud
Take your Docker Compose apps to production with zero-downtime deployments, automatic HTTPS, and cross-machine scaling. Self-hosting made reliable without the complexity.
Web Archiving: Playback Tools - Thomas Preece
Web Archiving: Playback Tools - Below I've listed some of the tools I found to playback web archives. The two most popular tools that I found were OpenWayback and PyWb. Of the tests I
The Industry-Leading Container Runtime | Docker
Read about our industry-leading Docker container runtimes. Docker Engine allows containerized apps to run consistently on any infrastructure — from anywhere.
turbopuffer: fast search on object storage
Inaugural blog post about the development of turbopuffer, a search engine that uses object storage and SSD caching for cost-effective, low latency search. This post describes into the motivation behind its creation, its unique architecture, and how it significantly reduces costs for large-scale vector searches. Discover how turbopuffer is transforming search infrastructure for companies like Cursor and Suno, offering a scalable and reliable solution.
IndieSearch
I built a prototype for client-side, fully distributed search for the IndieWeb — check out the demo & a little explainer.