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Microsoft Interview Question






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2
of 2 vote

A simple web crawler is pretty easy to implement. In Java, I know that there are a few libraries that would help you parse HTML pages.
Given an URL, get all the the URLs that are in this page. Then it becomes a Breadth First Search or Depth First Search traversals. Whatever you choose. DFS might consume too much memory in this case.

- vodangkhoa February 27, 2007 | Flag Reply
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0
of 0 votes

I think intention of this question is to think about the complex cases. How will you handle infinite loop, how will you handle url shortener etc.

- sam January 10, 2016 | Flag
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1
of 1 vote

There are atleast 3 components that are required.
1. HTTP Request/Getting page.
2. HTML Parser
3. URL Tracker

THe first component is to request a given URL and either download it to the machine or just keep it in memory. (Downloading will need design to store the web page for easy retreival)

HTML Parser - Removes the html tags and retains text of interest (I needed only part of the page based on some pattern) and URL s in the current page. A more generic webcrawler will have to save different components like image/sound etc

URL Tracker - URL tracker makes sure that no URL is visited twice within a set time frame( A simple mechanism is a hash table with a user-defined comparator function, some urls may still point to the exact same page eg www.abc.com and www.abc.com/index.htm)

The web crawler should start with a set of URLs.

- mp March 07, 2007 | Flag Reply
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0
of 0 votes

Think about maintaining a data structure for mainting links (fan-in and fan-out) counts. One might also be interested in displaying a graph(forest) of node(URL) and edges(fan-in and fan-out).

- peace November 04, 2009 | Flag
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0
of 0 vote

use lucene and much and get done with it

- vipul March 03, 2007 | Flag Reply
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0
of 0 vote

Hey dude . . That info was useful

- Sriram October 18, 2009 | Flag Reply


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