Conversation with Gemini Pro and GPT-4 Turbo on how to use Agent Technology, Realtime Crawler

Tsubasa Kato
4 min readApr 3, 2024

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I asked both Gemini Pro and GPT-4 Turbo on this topic:

Q. How would you make a program that searches the web, with a realtime crawler that uses swarm technology? How to implement it?

Gemini Pro:

1. Define the Crawling Scope and Parameters:

Determine the target websites or search engines to crawl.

Specify the depth of crawling (e.g., how many levels of pages to follow).

Set criteria for filtering and prioritizing URLs.

2. Design the Real-Time Crawler:

Swarm Technology: Use a distributed network of crawlers that can work in parallel.

Crawler Architecture: Design crawlers that can efficiently retrieve and parse web pages.

URL Frontier Management: Implement a system to manage a list of URLs to be crawled and prioritize them based on relevance.

3. Implement the Crawler Logic:

Crawling Algorithm: Write code that defines the crawling behavior, including URL scheduling, content extraction, and link discovery.

Web Page Parsing: Develop modules to parse web pages and extract relevant data.

Data Storage: Integrate a database or storage system to store crawled data.

4. Handle Real-Time Data:

Event-Driven Architecture: Implement an event-driven system that triggers crawler actions when new URLs are discovered.

Scalable Infrastructure: Design the system to handle the high volume of data and real-time updates.

Data Streaming: Use techniques such as Kafka or WebSockets to stream crawled data for real-time processing.

5. Implement Search Functionality:

Indexing: Index the crawled data to enable efficient searching.

Relevance Scoring: Develop algorithms to rank search results based on relevance to user queries.

User Interface: Create a user interface that allows users to enter queries and view search results.

6. Optimization and Monitoring:

Caching: Optimize the crawler by caching frequently accessed pages.

Load Balancing: Distribute the crawling workload across multiple servers.

Monitoring and Logging: Implement monitoring tools to track crawler performance, identify errors, and optimize the system.

Additional Considerations:

Ethical Impact: Ensure the crawler respects user privacy and adheres to ethical guidelines for web scraping.

Security: Implement security measures to protect against potential vulnerabilities and data breaches.

Legal Compliance: Comply with relevant regulations and laws regarding web scraping and data usage.

GPT-4 Turbo:

To embark on creating a real-time web crawler that leverages swarm technology, we need to first establish a foundational understanding of both concepts independently before fusing them into a cohesive system.

Understanding Web Crawling

Web crawling involves systematically browsing the internet to index the content of websites. The critical components of a web crawler include:

URL Frontier: A queue of URLs to visit.

Downloader: Retrieves web pages.

Parser: Extracts new URLs and relevant content from downloaded pages.

Database: Stores the extracted information and URLs.

Understanding Swarm Technology

Swarm technology is inspired by the collective behavior of decentralized, self-organized systems, such as flocks of birds or colonies of ants. In computing, it involves numerous agents (or mini-programs) working together to accomplish a task more efficiently than could be done individually. Key characteristics include:

Decentralization: No single point of failure or control.

Scalability: Ability to increase workload by simply adding more agents.

Flexibility: Adaptable to different or changing tasks.

Concept Integration: Swarm-Based Web Crawler

To develop a real-time, swarm-based web crawler, you’ll need to follow several strategic steps:

1. System Architecture

Decide on a decentralized architecture where each crawler agent can operate independently. Think of each agent as a mini-crawler that can find, fetch, and index web pages.

2. Swarm Coordination

Implement a protocol for how swarm agents communicate and share information (e.g., discovered URLs, domain visit frequencies) to avoid overlapping work and to ensure that the swarm efficiently covers the web space.

3. URL Partitioning

Divide the URL space among swarm agents. This can be done based on website domains, content types, or other criteria to ensure a balanced workload and reduce redundant crawling.

4. Real-time Indexing

Leverage in-memory databases or distributed streaming platforms (e.g., Apache Kafka) to process and index data in real time. This allows your crawler to quickly update its index with new or changed web content.

5. Adaptability and Fault Tolerance

Incorporate algorithms that allow your swarm to dynamically adapt to changes in the web landscape or recover from agent failures. This may involve redistributing URLs from a failed agent to others or adjusting the crawling frequency based on website updates.

6. Ethical Crawling

Ensure your crawler respects website rules (e.g., robots.txt) and internet ethics. Implement rate-limiting, user-agent disclosure, and polite crawling practices to prevent your swarm from overwhelming web server resources.

Implementation Tools and Technologies:

Programming Languages: Python (popular for crawling tasks), Go (efficient concurrency), or Scala (for Apache Kafka integration).

Message Brokers: RabbitMQ or Apache Kafka for managing communication between agents.

Databases: NoSQL databases like MongoDB for storing crawled content, Elasticsearch for real-time search indexing, or Redis for fast, in-memory data storage.

Cloud Services and Containers: Kubernetes for orchestrating your swarm containers, which can be deployed across cloud services like AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure for scalability.

Conclusion

Creating a real-time, swarm-based web crawler is a sophisticated but feasible task that combines distributed systems, real-time data processing, and ethical web crawling principles. By following a structured approach to design, implement, and scale your system, you can efficiently harness the power of swarm technology to navigate and index the dynamic landscape of the web.

My LinkedIn Profile:

https://jp.linkedin.com/in/tsubasakato

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Tsubasa Kato
Tsubasa Kato

Written by Tsubasa Kato

Japanese Search Engineer. Likes Quantum Computers and handheld computers.

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