Automated News & Content Crawler Suite
High-throughput automated web crawling suite monitoring media feeds, extracting structured article content, and detecting broken hyperlinks with multi-status validation.
Problem Statement & High-Level Architecture
Developed a suite of automated web crawlers and hyperlink integrity auditors that continuously monitor digital media feeds, extract structured article content, and sanitize web hyperlinks across multi-domain publication networks.
Engineering Design & Data Pipeline
Features automated HTTP status verification (detecting 404, 500, 520 response codes), content deduplication algorithms, and direct publishing into centralized content databases.
Platform Features & Technical Capabilities
Automated news feed monitoring and article body extraction
High-speed broken link detector verifying status codes across thousands of URLs
Centralized publishing API with category tagging and media embedding
Automated CSV and JSON audit report generation
Engineering Bottlenecks & Architectural Solutions
Handling diverse article layouts and anti-scraping protections across dozens of media websites.
- Highly diverse HTML DOM layouts and aggressive anti-scraping paywall defenses.
- Ingested feeds polluted with navigation menus, sidebars, and advertising copy.
- High memory footprints when executing headless browsers across thousands of news feeds.
Implemented heuristic content extractors that identify main article bodies regardless of surrounding DOM layout changes.
- Heuristic readability extractors isolating core article text independent of DOM changes.
- Lightweight worker lifecycle recycling browser instances to keep RAM usage bounded.
- Automated text deduplication and sanitization pipeline filtering syndicated duplicate copy.