Breadth first search algorithm on internet using ChatGPT #BFS #ai
The speaker demonstrates how to apply breadth-first search (BFS) algorithms to traverse the internet by treating websites as nodes and using web scraping to discover links. They successfully visit over 50,000 websites in 2 hours using Google Colab, showing how web crawlers work in practice.
Summary
The speaker begins by explaining that while BFS is typically easy to implement on a given graph, applying it to the internet presents a unique challenge since there's no predefined graph structure. They propose treating each website as a node and using the links within websites to create connections between nodes. The approach involves web scraping to discover new website URLs, adding them to a queue, and continuously traversing and scraping in a simultaneous process that mimics how web crawlers and spiderbots operate. The speaker uses ChatGPT to generate the Python code based on a pseudocode prompt, then executes the experiment on Google Colab platform, which provides free access to 12GB RAM and fast processing. Starting with python.org as the entry point, they begin the traversal process, noting that it's significantly slower than traditional competitive programming graph traversals because each node discovery requires web scraping rather than simple memory access. The process takes several seconds per website compared to visiting 1,000 nodes per second in memory-based graphs. After running for 2 hours, they successfully visit approximately 50,000 websites, demonstrating how major search engine crawlers like Google's spiderbot and Bing's bot operate to collect and store website URLs in databases.
Key Insights
- The speaker explains that applying BFS to the internet requires treating websites as nodes and using web scraping to dynamically discover links, since no predefined graph structure exists for the internet
- The speaker demonstrates that web traversal is significantly slower than traditional graph algorithms, taking several seconds per website compared to visiting 1,000 nodes per second in memory-based competitive programming scenarios
- The speaker reveals that their BFS internet traversal method successfully visited approximately 50,000 websites in 2 hours, showing how this approach mirrors the functionality of major search engine crawlers like Google's spiderbot
Topics
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