Heritrix

Heritrix is the Internet Archive's open-source, extensible, web-scale, archival-quality web crawler project. Heritrix (sometimes spelled heretrix, or misspelled or missaid as heratrix/heritix/heretix/heratix) is an archaic word for heiress (woman who inherits). Since our crawler seeks to collect and preserve the digital artifacts of our culture for the benefit of future researchers and generations, this name seemed apt. Heritrix is designed to respect the robots.txt exclusion directives† and META nofollow tags. Please consider the load your crawl will place on seed sites and set politeness policies accordingly. Also, always identify your crawl with contact information in the User-Agent so sites that may be adversely affected by your crawl can contact you or adapt their server behavior accordingly.