Common Crawl
Common Crawl is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization that crawls the web and freely provides its archives and datasets to the public. Common Crawl's web archive consists of petabytes of data collected since 2008. It completes crawls generally every month.
| Type of business | 501(c)(3) non-profit |
|---|---|
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California; Los Angeles, California, United States |
| Founder(s) | Gil Elbaz |
| Key people | Peter Norvig, Nova Spivack, Carl Malamud, Kurt Bollacker, Joi Ito |
| URL | commoncrawl |
Common Crawl was founded by Gil Elbaz. Advisors to the non-profit include Peter Norvig and Joi Ito. The organization's crawlers respect nofollow and robots.txt policies. Open source code for processing Common Crawl's data set is publicly available.
The Common Crawl dataset includes copyrighted work and is distributed from the US under fair use claims. Researchers in other countries have made use of techniques such as shuffling sentences or referencing the common crawl dataset to work around copyright law in other legal jurisdictions.
As of March 2023, in the most recent version of the Common Crawl dataset, 46% of documents had English as their primary language (followed by German, Russian, Japanese, French, Spanish and Chinese, all below 6%).