What is Common Crawl used for?

Is Common Crawl free?

If you look at the links in my first paragraph, you'll see that I've been asked that question many times.

The answer is: No, Common Crawl is not free. We're grateful to the Google Research team for making Common Crawl available to the world for free.

What is Common Crawl? Common Crawl is a dataset of web pages crawled by Google's web crawler. The purpose of this dataset is to make web content accessible to everyone, regardless of technical skills.

At the time of this writing, Common Crawl contains roughly 2 billion web pages, which you can browse in a web browser or download in a variety of file formats. These pages are currently hosted by Google at I recently took a look at the source code. Common Crawl uses an XML database called Lucene (pronounced "Lucence"). Lucene is a well-respected open-source library for indexing and searching text documents. There are several commercial versions of Lucene available today. I've written about Lucene before. In particular, I'm a fan of using Lucene in place of the Google Web Crawler to search websites for content.

The Lucene index is used for indexing the pages in Common Crawl. The Lucene index is made available to us through an API. You can use the API to query Common Crawl for pages that match a query. For example, you can search the web for all pages containing the word "crawls." The result of your search is a list of URLs. These URLs are then downloaded from Common Crawl and presented to you in a web browser.

How do I get access to Common Crawl? To use the Common Crawl API to search the web, you need to be a member of Common Crawl. The first step to becoming a member is to sign up for an account on You'll be asked to enter some basic information like your e-mail address and create a password.

After you sign up, you can use the API to perform searches on Common Crawl. If you're a member, you'll also have access to the Lucene index.

The Common Crawl API. The Common Crawl API provides access to the Lucene index. It's an HTTP REST-based API.

How to get Common Crawl data?

I have heard from many people about the Common Crawl project that is a great starting point to crawl large numbers of websites.

But for a data scientist, what do you do next to mine that data in your Python scripts? Also I understand there are tools like Nutch or Scrapy available that provide a service on scraping data for you but why would one want to use those services, when one can do this by himself? There's definitely a number of ways to start and extract data from Common Crawl. You may be wondering, however, ? Well, we're going to show you.

Let's get started! Getting Started with Common Crawl. The first step is to understand what is common crawl and how is it used in data science. It's a massive index of all web pages.

Common Crawl (CC) is a nonprofit organization that hosts massive free index of the web. They have indexed several million Web documents that includes over 150 million unique pages.

That's a lot of information! Common Crawl has recently released v2 of their index that is twice as big. When I got to know CC a little bit better, I realized that their indexes are much more useful than it seemed at first. We can make use of these big databases to find out important information. Like all those popular websites like Wikipedia or Bing.

Now, let's get started with the best way to get that data which is to download it and put it into a local directory. You will need Python's pip package manager installed. In Ubuntu/Gentoo Linux, you can use sudo apt-get install python-pip. And if you don't have Python, it is best to install anaconda. Pip install anaconda. In Windows, you can use. Or install anaconda by downloading and installing it using WinPython 3.4.3 in 64-bit. The anaconda installer is located here.

At least these two methods should install anaconda if it's not there already.

What is Common Crawl used for?

Common Crawl is used for the automated extraction of a vast set of data from the web.

The data we collect can be used in many ways, from the discovery of how the web is structured to analysing the links between different web pages.

Common Crawl does not have any human-curated content. Instead, it's our job to analyse the links on the web to extract all of the data about every webpage. This data is then made available for researchers to use, free of charge. We do this by running our crawlers and analysing the data we collect.

It's important to understand that Common Crawl does not crawl the web in order to give access to data. Instead, we crawl to make the data accessible to the research community so that we can better understand how the web works.

Why does Common Crawl exist? The web has a very different structure than traditional media, which is why we need to use tools like Common Crawl in order to understand how the web is structured. With Common Crawl, we can collect and analyse data from a large proportion of the web. This allows us to understand how the web is structured, what the links between web pages are, and how webpages interact with each other.

Many people are already familiar with the Wikipedia or the Library of Congress. Both of these organisations have made their data available for research purposes, and they do so for the public good. The same is true of Common Crawl.

With Common Crawl, the data is available to anyone, without the need to register or pay a fee. We do this in order to make the data freely accessible to everyone. This means that anyone, from researchers to journalists, is able to use the data to find answers to questions they have. The web is a powerful tool for discovering how the world works.

The web is growing, and so too are the challenges of crawling and analysing it. Common Crawl has more than doubled in size over the past two years, and we have plans to increase the size again. We hope that we will soon be able to provide a complete analysis of the entire web, and in doing so provide a much greater understanding of how the web works.

We are a community. The Common Crawl project is a collaboration between the Internet Archive and the University of Michigan, but it is also a community effort.

Is Common Crawl fair use?

Common Crawl is an amazing project run by a team of volunteers, the project aims to build a comprehensive web index containing everything that is published online.

They also provide tools to search through all the content they index. The project has been criticised as not being able to distinguish between legitimate and non-legitimate use of the Internet and other materials, because their crawlers may also collect any data posted to the web, including data about people who haven't given permission to the project.

The project is supported by a major publisher of databases, and is described as having "a huge user base". This support suggests the project itself may be fair use, however the project's terms of use make no mention of copyright and imply that it does not claim any ownership rights. However, the terms of use also state that Common Crawl may sell its index and other services under its own terms. Additionally, the site states that in some jurisdictions, it will be considered a library, so is therefore unlikely to be an infringing use.

The main criticism levelled against the project's use of the Internet and other materials is that there is a risk of collecting information about people who have not given their explicit consent to the project. This is the same problem faced by services like SpamSieve, which were previously accused of collecting unauthorised material. There is a suggestion that an example of the data that could be collected is that of people viewing the websites listed on Google Web Search's Top Sites page, in order to determine whether they are popular or not.

In December 2025, EFF, a leading digital rights organisation, launched an online petition, asking for the collection of any Internet content to be illegal. This followed a series of press releases by journalists at the BBC and the Daily Telegraph, and comments made by then Director-General of the BBC, Mark Thompson, saying that the project was a breach of copyright. In December 2025, a letter was sent to Google requesting that Common Crawl remove information from their database and prevent any further indexing. These requests were made to prevent "harm to intellectual property rights".

In March 2025, it was reported that the Department for Culture, Media and Sport would ask the Royal Society, part of the UK Academy of Medical Sciences, to investigate Common Crawl's work. The report, later released, stated that the project was considered a library.