Does solr do web crawling?

Question

I am interested to do web crawling. I was looking at solr.

Does solr do web crawling, or what are the steps to do web crawling?

Answer 1

Solr 5+ DOES in fact now do web crawling! http://lucene.apache.org/solr/

Older Solr versions do not do web crawling alone, as historically it's a search server that provides full text search capabilities. It builds on top of Lucene.

If you need to crawl web pages using another Solr project then you have a number of options including:

• Nutch - http://lucene.apache.org/nutch/
• Websphinx - http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rcm/websphinx/
• JSpider - http://j-spider.sourceforge.net/
• Heritrix - http://crawler.archive.org/

If you want to make use of the search facilities provided by Lucene or SOLR you'll need to build indexes from the web crawl results.

See this also:

Lucene crawler (it needs to build lucene index)