browsertrix-crawler VS wiktextract

(Disclaimer: I work at Webrecorder)

Our automated crawler browsertrix-crawler (https://github.com/webrecorder/browsertrix-crawler) uses Puppeteer to run browsers that we archive in by loading pages, running behaviors such as auto-scroll, and then record the request/response traffic. We have some custom behavior for some social media and video sites to make sure that content is appropriate captured. It is a bit of a cat-and-mouse game as we have to continue to update these behaviors as sites change, but for the most part it works pretty well.

The trickier part is in replaying the archived websites, as a certain amount of re-writing has to happen in order to make sure the HTML and JS are working with archived assets rather than the live web. One implementation of this is replayweb.page (https://github.com/webrecorder/replayweb.page), which does all of the rewriting client-side in the browser. This sets you interact with archived websites in WARC or WACZ format as if interacting with the original site.

I use browsertrix-crawler[0] for crawling and it does well on JS heavy sites since it uses a real browser to request pages. Even has options to load browser profiles so you can crawl while being authenticated on sites.

[0] https://github.com/webrecorder/browsertrix-crawler

I have started using the tools from https://webrecorder.net like Browsertrix Crawler and they have been working great. The web archive format is open source and very portable. The crawler even crawls and saves YouTube videos embedded on pages which is awesome.

This looks like a good candidate for https://github.com/webrecorder/browsertrix-crawler.

I just learned about this organization, Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO): https://www.sucho.org/

They seem to be using various tools, like Browsertrix: https://github.com/webrecorder/browsertrix-crawler

It sounds promising for interactive sites:

> Support for custom browser behaviors, using Browsertix Behaviors including autoscroll, video autoplay and site-specific behaviors

Browsertrix links to https://replayweb.page/ for a way to view an archived site.

If you need more advanced recursive spider/crawling ability beyond --depth=1, check out Browsertrix, Photon, or Scrapy and pipe the outputted URLs into ArchiveBox.

I recommend this: https://github.com/webrecorder/browsertrix-crawler

Great work

I'm working on similar dictionary app and found wiktionary insanely usable as dictionary source.

Here is one more project aiming to make wiktionary data usable as json data structure: https://github.com/tatuylonen/wiktextract.

It has a link to a site https://kaikki.org/ which hosts dictionary data dumps.

Hm, that would be a good idea... if I didn't have to download so much data (over 20GB for just audio?!). But, looking at the Python library that processed those dumps (https://github.com/tatuylonen/wiktextract), which is more manageable, using it would involve getting the WikiMedia dump file for every word on the list, then parsing them for the relevant data and what follows is mostly the same, except I end up with a bunch of cached files.

Many parsers are available. https://github.com/tatuylonen/wiktextract

I'd probably try pulling from Wiktionary, there looks to be a Python package that can do it here.

And the json is built with https://github.com/tatuylonen/wiktextract whom I have to thank