80 legs: Web Crawler as a Service
80legs.com
80 legs: Web Crawler as a Service
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Re: 80 legs: Web Crawler as a Service
#2[deleted]
Re: 80 legs: Web Crawler as a Service
#3Interesting, it's a botnet! From the FAQ: "How can the prices be so low?" "Plura pays developers to embed lightweight widgets in their desktop applications or websites. These widgets harness the idle and excess bandwidth and computing power on the computers of people using the applications and websites."
Re: 80 legs: Web Crawler as a Service
#4Interesting, it's a botnet! From the FAQ: "How can the prices be so low?" "Plura pays developers to embed lightweight widgets in their desktop applications or websites. These widgets harness the idle and excess bandwidth and computing power on the computers of people using the applications and websites."
I prefer shady botnets being used for stuff like this rather than sending and posting spam, but I'd guess that most of the 50k users who have installed this have no idea that they have and what it does.
I didn't look very hard to find it, but is there a list of places/apps that install this?
Re: 80 legs: Web Crawler as a Service
#5Interesting, it's a botnet! From the FAQ: "How can the prices be so low?" "Plura pays developers to embed lightweight widgets in their desktop applications or websites. These widgets harness the idle and excess bandwidth and computing power on the computers of people using the applications and websites."
I prefer shady botnets being used for stuff like this rather than sending and posting spam, but I'd guess that most of the 50k users who have installed this have no idea that they have and what it does. I didn't look very hard to find it, but is there a list of places/apps that install this?
I looked at the Plura website, and it seems they mostly target institutions (Schools and such) that want to make money off of their spare cycles. So it's not like they're directly installing stuff on the machines of unwitting fools; they pay for processor time.
EDIT: wow, never mind, I totally misunderstood their model:
Re: 80 legs: Web Crawler as a Service
#6Earlier quoted context omitted.
I prefer shady botnets being used for stuff like this rather than sending and posting spam, but I'd guess that most of the 50k users who have installed this have no idea that they have and what it does. I didn't look very hard to find it, but is there a list of places/apps that install this?
I looked at the Plura website, and it seems they mostly target institutions (Schools and such) that want to make money off of their spare cycles. So it's not like they're directly installing stuff on the machines of unwitting fools; they pay for processor time. EDIT: wow, never mind, I totally misunderstood their model: http://www.pluraprocessing.com/technology.html
Inspiring.
Reminds me of old ways in doing cloud computing:
EC2 : http://www.nd.edu/~parasite/
S3 : http://isec.pl/papers/juggling_with_packets.txt
; )
Re: 80 legs: Web Crawler as a Service
#7Hi guys. We were actually about to do an "Ask HN: Review our startup" post, but I guess someone beat us to it.
So, please review our startup. :)
We are launching the beta today to a handful of users and will be letting in more and more users over time.
One other note: We don't just offer crawling. Our model is actually to allow you to analyze the web content that you discover. Using your own custom code that you push into 80legs, you can do sophisticated text processing, image processing, look inside PDFs, etc.
Re: 80 legs: Web Crawler as a Service
#8Interesting, it's a botnet! From the FAQ: "How can the prices be so low?" "Plura pays developers to embed lightweight widgets in their desktop applications or websites. These widgets harness the idle and excess bandwidth and computing power on the computers of people using the applications and websites."
Plura affiliates actually accept responsibility for getting the permission of their users. Plura encourages disclosure and has found that it is actually very well received by the users once it is explained. It always works our better for Plura affiliates when they disclose. To that end, Plura has actually changed it's TOS with affiliates so that they directly take responsibility for getting user acceptance.
Most Plura apps/websites give users optin/optout capabilities. Rather than anything ill-intentioned, the actual model is really that Plura gives application developers a means of offering their application at a discount (or free) to users that don't mind trading their excess computer resources for the app. For those that don't want Plura+free, the application developer can give them other options (pay, ads, whatever).
Once the users really understand it, they are almost always happy that the developer has a new means of monetization so that the developer will continue to improve the software they are using.
BTW, this all runs in a secure java sandbox where nothing can actually see the users data, disk, what programs are running, or anything else about the computer. Plura has gone to great lengths to try to sanitize the entire process and be good guys.
Re: 80 legs: Web Crawler as a Service
#9Hi guys. We were actually about to do an "Ask HN: Review our startup" post, but I guess someone beat us to it. So, please review our startup. :) We are launching the beta today to a handful of users and will be letting in more and more users over time. One other note: We don't just offer crawling. Our model is actually to allow you to analyze the web content that you discover. Using your own custom code that you push…
Sorry for hijacking your plan to post here first, but i found the idea incredibly cool and useful, and didn't know you guys are around here on HN. 80 legs can potentially save a lot of effort for people/companies who need to crawl web for data and analyze it.
Hope this really works out well for all of you.
p.s. Just in case you are curious, i got a reference note about your application from someone who was following Web 2.0 Expo.
Re: 80 legs: Web Crawler as a Service
#10Hi guys. We were actually about to do an "Ask HN: Review our startup" post, but I guess someone beat us to it. So, please review our startup. :) We are launching the beta today to a handful of users and will be letting in more and more users over time. One other note: We don't just offer crawling. Our model is actually to allow you to analyze the web content that you discover. Using your own custom code that you push…
It looks pretty cool and even something I might be interested in using.
However my initial feedback relates to clarity.. on the About page you say 'crawl 2bn pages' then 'pay $2 per million pages crawled' and don't actually say that - as I understand it - customers set up custom searches matching a regexp and only pay for the hits (crawls) that match.
My immediate reaction on seeing '2bn'/'$2 per million' was to firstly think 'wtf, $4k per day then?' and secondly 'I hope that's an American not a British billion'. (Though we seem to have adopted yours, now.)
It's really just a wording/clarity thing though, and I might be alone in this.