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---
pretty_name: ProdCrawl
language:
- en
size_categories:
- 1M<n<10M
task_categories:
- text-classification
tags:
- focused-crawling
- web-crawling
- test-collection
- information-retrieval
- warc
license: cc-by-nc-4.0
configs:
- config_name: judgments
default: true
sep: "\t"
data_files:
- split: train
path: judgments/train.tsv
- split: validation
path: judgments/validation.tsv
- split: test
path: judgments/test.tsv
---
# ProdCrawl: A Replayable Test Collection for Focused Crawling
Evaluating focused web crawlers on the live internet is notoriously messy: remote websites change constantly, servers throttle requests unpredictably, and testing a crawler against its own internal classifier is an evaluation trap.
**ProdCrawl** fixes this by providing an offline, deterministic playground. It contains complete static mirrors of **621 company and organizational websites** (over 1.1 million pages) paired with precomputed ground-truth labels for every single reachable page. Because every crawl replays identical web pages against identical target labels, different link prioritization strategies can finally be compared under strictly controlled conditions.
* **Code & Reproduction Framework:** [github.com/IRLab-UDC/prodcrawl](https://www.google.com/url?sa=E&source=gmail&q=https://github.com/IRLab-UDC/prodcrawl)
* **Fine-tuned Bi-Encoder:** [`irlab-udc/sbert-anchor-product-page-v5`](https://huggingface.co/irlab-udc/sbert-anchor-product-page-v5)
---
## Dataset Overview
The collection is organized into relevance judgments (for scoring) and compressed web archives (for serving the local web environment):
```
judgments/{train,validation,test}.tsv Relevance judgment for every reachable page
warcs/{train,validation,test}/<site>.warc.gz One compressed WARC archive per domain
warcs/manifest.tsv Manifest with paths, record counts, and SHA-256 hashes
warcs/manifests/<site>.json Per-site mirroring metadata
```
### Splits
All splits are partitioned **strictly by website domain**. Web pages within the same domain share navigation menus, boilerplate, and anchor text phrasing; splitting at the page level would cause severe data leakage.
| Split | Sites | Total Pages | Product Pages | WARC Size |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| **Train** | 318 | 544,059 | 208,124 (38.3%) | 15.0 GB |
| **Validation** | 167 | 301,312 | 72,847 (24.2%) | 7.2 GB |
| **Test** | 136 | 257,563 | 116,480 (45.2%) | 7.0 GB |
| **Total** | **621** | **1,102,934** | **397,451 (36.0%)** | **29.2 GB** |
Every domain contains at least one target product page, and English is the primary language across ~95% of the sites.
---
## The Crawling Task
The crawler begins at a domain's homepage with a constrained download budget and must prioritize which links to follow to discover high-value transactional **product pages** as early as possible.
### What Counts as a Product Page?
* **Relevant (`True`):** A page whose clear goal is bottom-of-the-funnel conversion for a specific item, service tier, or software solution. Hallmarks include pricing tables, feature specifications, SKU descriptions, demo request forms, or "Add to Cart" actions.
* **Not Relevant (`False`):** Top- or mid-funnel content such as corporate overviews, blogs, news announcements, knowledge base articles, general documentation, or broad navigation hubs lacking a direct conversion mechanism.
---
## Relevance Judgments & Ground Truth
To avoid manual labeling bottlenecks across 1.1M documents while eliminating circular reliance on crawler-internal models, ground truth was established using an **LLM jury**:
* **Judges:** `Llama 3.1 8B Instruct`, `Llama 4 Scout 17B-16E Instruct`, and `Gemma 3 27B IT`.
* **Protocol:** Text was extracted with ReadabiliPy (first 10,000 characters) and judged independently via constrained greedy decoding (`Yes`/`No`) under an identical task prompt.
* **Consensus:** Final labels represent majority consensus. Across all splits, 84% to 89% of decisions were unanimous, with Fleiss' $\kappa$ between 0.76 and 0.85 (substantial agreement).
### Loading Judgments
```python
from datasets import load_dataset
judgments = load_dataset("irlab-udc/prodcrawl", "judgments")
print(judgments["test"][0])
# Example output: {'url': 'http://www.example.com/products/tool.html', 'label': True}
```
---
## Web Mirrors & Replay Architecture
Each website is stored as an individual gzipped WARC/1.1 file (`warcs/<split>/<site>.warc.gz`) containing the deterministic HTML responses captured via HTTrack.
### Reading WARCs Programmatically
```python
from warcio.archiveiterator import ArchiveIterator
with open("warcs/test/guesttek.com.warc.gz", "rb") as f:
for record in ArchiveIterator(f):
if record.rec_type == "resource":
target_url = record.rec_headers.get_header("WARC-Target-URI")
raw_html = record.content_stream().read()
```
### Downloading Specific Splits via Hugging Face Hub
```python
from huggingface_hub import snapshot_download
# Download only the test split (WARCs + ground-truth TSV)
snapshot_download(
repo_id="irlab-udc/prodcrawl",
repo_type="dataset",
allow_patterns=["judgments/test.tsv", "warcs/test/*"]
)
```
### URL Structure Notes
The mirror URLs reflect offline archive paths rather than live endpoints:
* Query strings are encoded directly into path segments (e.g., `[http://example.com/__querystring__p=12/index_no_slash.html](http://example.com/__querystring__p=12/index_no_slash.html)`).
* Missing file extensions or root directories typically map to `.../index.html` or `.../index_no_slash.html`.
* All URLs are normalized to `http://` using the site's original hostname.
---
## How to Run & Evaluate a Crawler
1. **Host the Mirrors:** Unpack the desired WARC split and serve it locally using Apache or Nginx as detailed in the [reproduction repository](https://www.google.com/url?sa=E&source=gmail&q=https://github.com/IRLab-UDC/prodcrawl).
2. **Execute Traversal:** Point your crawler at `http://<local-server>/<site-domain>/` with your link prioritization policy active.
3. **Score the Trace:** After running for a budget of $b$ requests, evaluate the ordered sequence of fetched URLs against `judgments/<split>.tsv`. Any visited page not found in the ground truth (e.g., auto-generated directory listings) is treated as non-relevant (`False`).
The standard metric is Mean Average Precision normalized by domain targets and the Area Under the \\(MAP\\) Curve for early traversal budgets (e.g., \\( b \in [1, 30] \\)):
$$MAP@b = \frac{1}{\vert{}D\vert{}} \sum_{d \in D} \frac{1}{R_d} \sum_{i \le b, \, rel(p_i^d)=1} \text{Precision}@i$$
where \\(R_d\\) is the total count of relevant product pages in domain \\(d\\).
---
## License & Fair Use
The judgments, metadata, and collection structure are provided under the **Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0)**.
The underlying web documents were gathered and archived strictly for non-commercial academic research, empirical reproducibility, and information retrieval evaluation under fair use principles. Copyright for individual website contents remains with the original domain publishers. To request removal of a mirrored domain, open an issue in the Community tab.
---
## Citation
```bibtex
@misc{reyescobar2026prodcrawl,
title = {ProdCrawl: A Replayable Test Collection for Focused Crawling},
author = {Rey-Escobar, Manuel and Otero, David and Parapar, Javier},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {\url{https://github.com/IRLab-UDC/prodcrawl}},
note = {Dataset available at Hugging Face: \url{https://huggingface.co/datasets/irlab-udc/prodcrawl}}
}
```
```text
Manuel Rey-Escobar, David Otero, and Javier Parapar. 2026.
ProdCrawl: A Replayable Test Collection for Focused Crawling.
Available at https://github.com/IRLab-UDC/prodcrawl
```