ACHE Focused Crawler

ACHE is a focused web crawler. It collects web pages that satisfy some specific criteria, e.g., pages that belong to a given domain or that contain a user-specified pattern. ACHE differs from generic crawlers in sense that it uses page classifiers to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant pages in a given domain. A page classifier can be defined as a simple regular expression (e.g., that matches every page that contains a specific word) or a machine-learning-based classification model. ACHE also automatically learns how to prioritize links in order to efficiently locate relevant content while avoiding the retrieval of irrelevant pages. While ACHE was originally designed to perform focused crawls, it also supports other crawling tasks, including crawling all pages in a given web site and crawling Dark Web sites (using the TOR protocol).