Crawling a billion web pages in just over 24 hours
Hacker News
February 23, 2026
AI-Generated Deep Dive Summary
Crawling over a billion web pages in just 25.5 hours on a budget of $462 demonstrates how far technology has come since similar efforts were attempted nearly a decade ago. The author, inspired by Michael Nielsen’s 2012 crawl, set out to replicate the feat while accounting for modern advancements like faster CPUs, NVMe storage, and improved network speeds. Despite challenges such as dynamic web content and stricter politeness protocols, the experiment succeeded, showing that large-scale crawling is now more accessible than ever.
The author chose a cluster of 12 optimized nodes, each handling a shard of domains, rather than separating crawler functions into different machines. This approach, while cost-effective, relied on careful resource allocation and fault-tolerance measures to handle interruptions. The crawl adhered strictly to robots.txt guidelines, maintained a delay between requests, and avoided JavaScript-heavy pages, focusing instead on HTML-only content. Surprisingly, this method still captured a significant portion of the web, highlighting how much remains accessible without dynamic rendering.
The success of the crawl underscores the importance of balancing performance with ethical practices. While modern tech allows for faster and more efficient crawling, respecting server load and adhering to guidelines is crucial to avoid disrupting websites or causing harm. The author’s achievement not only demonstrates technical feasibility but also serves as a reminder that even complex tasks can be accomplished on modest budgets, offering inspiration to startups and researchers alike.
This experiment matters because it challenges the notion that scaling web crawling requires immense resources. By leveraging modern hardware and thoughtful design, it shows how far we’ve come in making such projects more accessible. For tech enthusiasts and entrepreneurs, this highlights opportunities for innovation while emphasizing the need for responsible practices in web scraping and crawling.
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Originally published on Hacker News on 2/23/2026