I'm really curious to find out how much it'll cost to crawl a billion pages. Doesn't really matter if you used a SaaS solution or built your own crawler, any info would be really useful.
Even taking into account the drop in prices on AWS.
Also, if you take a quick look at companies that provide such services the prices are orders of magnitude higher than deusu's costs.
Deusu's crawl servers are located at https://www.hosteurope.de/en/Server/Root-Server/ while the website points to his home broadband ISP. Two servers at his specs would be 200 Euro/month total, with 5x more bandwidth than he currently uses. I'd say that's much cheaper that AWS. Of course crawl companies charge more: they run a business, pay system administrators, have more backup and redundancy.
I'm not sure how he manages to crawl with this speed using such low amount of resources.
We did a benchmark on Nutch and couldn't really pass the 10-14 M(B)ps on a $1200/month machine. Even though we hired a professional to optimize the setup. The same is roughly true about Heritrix.
Just wondering if there is something missing in his setup, such as domain/ip rate limiting.
I've crawled over a billion pages over a stretch of 3 years or so. Crawling is the easy task and just crawling a billion pages wouldn't cost more than a few thousand a month. Add a couple more thousand for storing these pages in a search index and database.
I think it would be valuable to have an open dataset of a raw crawl index. It could be distributed via academic torrents or partner with a hosting provider.
The real innovation won't be in crawling but in working on the index, filtering it, organizing it, trying sort algorithms and learning.
If this was available and gained popularity I could see competition in search again.
Here's the author's comment on hardware https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12487003 and later he says it costs 300 Euro/month to run the service.