System Design Interview: Decentralized Web Crawler
The article discusses the design of a decentralized web crawler that operates without a central component. Each node in the system runs independently and must agree on crawling tasks without coordination. The design emphasizes scalability, fault tolerance, and eventual coverage of web pages while avoiding duplicates.
- ▪A decentralized web crawler operates across independent nodes without shared infrastructure.
- ▪Each node is responsible for crawling URLs based on a hashed key that determines ownership.
- ▪The system is designed to handle billions of URLs and thousands of nodes while remaining fault-tolerant.
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Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | DEV.to (Top) |
| Canonical URL | https://dev.to/scalablethoughts/system-design-interview-decentralized-web-crawler-525o |
| Publication time | Mon, 25 May 2026 05:05:55 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-25T05:37:36.224Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-25T05:37:36.224Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | fsiN4Cve9HfD |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
try { if(localStorage) { let currentUser = localStorage.getItem('current_user'); if (currentUser) { currentUser = JSON.parse(currentUser); if (currentUser.id === 3949898) { document.getElementById('article-show-container').classList.add('current-user-is-article-author'); } } } } catch (e) { console.error(e); } Scalable Thoughts Posted on May 25 • Originally published at scalablethoughts.com System Design Interview: Decentralized Web Crawler #webdev #softwareengineering #systemdesign #programming Understand the problem What we're building. A web crawler that runs across independent nodes with no central component.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at DEV.to (Top).
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