The Desi Architect
Notes / Design Interview Problems / Design a Distributed Web Crawler at Scale (Search Engine Ingestion & Politeness Engine)
Track 5 · Design Interview Problems

Design a Distributed Web Crawler at Scale (Search Engine Ingestion & Politeness Engine)

Crawling ten billion documents without crashing target web servers or blowing up your storage. How to architect a distributed web crawler with dual frontier queues for priority and politeness, Bloom filter URL deduplication, asynchronous DNS pre-fetching, SimHash near-duplicate detection, and defensive spider trap filters.

Interview problem25 min read
On this page
  1. The afternoon a crawler crashed three hundred merchants
  2. 🟢 Layer 1: Core Mechanics & High-Level Architecture
  3. 🟡 Layer 2: Deep Dive into the URL Frontier
  4. 🔴 Layer 3: Engineering Depth, Scale & Edge Traps
  5. The Decision Matrix
  6. Cross-Questions & Deep Dives