Scaling a targeted web crawler beyond 500M pages/day
I've been reading up on crawler architecture. The two most useful sources I've found are the blog post "Crawling a billion web pages in just over 24 hours, in 2025" and the Mercator paper ("Mercator: A Scalable, Extensible Web Crawler").Both of these, and most other material I've come across, focus on crawling the broad open web rather than a targeted set of domains. For product prices it's the latter. Mercator calls out DNS resolution as a major bottleneck, for example, but when you're only hitting a few hundred domains that isn't really a concern.The other gap is that both assume static HTML. For our use case we need a headless browser, and we also have to deal with Cloudflare and similar anti-bot systems.For product prices specifically, a lot of sites publish price feeds which simplifies things, but plenty don't, and getting good coverage still requires scraping. Our current system does about 500M pages/day and we're looking to improve its performance.Does anyone here have experience in this space, or know of articles/blog posts on scaling targeted (rather than broad) crawlers with headless browsers? Any pointers appreciated.
FL score
out of 100
Verdict
medium confidence
Competition
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A technical optimization problem for an existing crawler, not a business idea with clear market demand.
The pain
The gap
Build angle
Strengths
- Real, measurable constraint (500M pages/day is substantial scale)
- Specific technical problem with known bottlenecks (headless browser overhead, Cloudflare)
- Founder has working infrastructure and domain knowledge
- Targeted crawling is simpler than broad-web crawling in some ways
Risks
- No evidence of market demand or willingness to pay for a solution
- Competitive landscape already has well-funded, mature solutions
- The 'product' would be infrastructure/SaaS, high operational burden, thin margins
- Anti-bot detection is an arms race; technical advantage is temporary
- Founder appears to be optimizing internal operations, not exploring external market fit
- Headless browser scaling is a known hard problem; no silver bullet exists
- Legal/ToS risk with scraping at scale remains unaddressed
Fly Labs Method
Is the pain real, is there a gap, is it the right time, can one person build it.
Value Equation
Dream outcome and how likely it feels, against the time and effort it costs.
One-Person Business
Curiosity pull, identity fit, and a path from free value to paid for a solo creator.
Viral Frameworks
Hook strength, shareability, and how cheaply it can be tested.
Builder Lens
Evidence the problem exists, timing, defensibility, and a model that fits on a napkin.
Five lenses, one composite. How scoring works
The angle
No market research recorded for this idea yet.
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