A comprehensive blueprint for automated global news aggregation. Designed to crawl respectful of target site resources, comply strictly with web standards, protect site owners' interests, avoid IP blacklisting, and collate daily bite-sized news digests for users.
2. The 6 Pillars of Polite Crawling
3. System Architecture & Data Flow
4. RSS / Atom Feed Preference Strategy
5. Concurrency & Rate Limiting Engine
6. Avoiding Blacklists & IP Bans
The goal of the News Els Engine is to gather, collate, and deliver fresh, daily bite-sized news digests customized to user preferences across categories (Tech, World, Finance, Science, Sports).
Always fetch, parse, and strictly obey robots.txt directives (including Disallow, Allow, and Crawl-delay) prior to requesting any path on a domain.
Enforce strict per-host token bucket queues. Limit requests to max 1 request every 2 to 5 seconds per domain and cap concurrent TCP sockets per target host to 1.
Declare explicit User-Agent strings containing our bot name, version, project URL, and contact email so publishers can easily identify or contact us.
Prefer RSS/Atom XML feeds over HTML scraping. Use HTTP ETag & If-Modified-Since headers to receive 304 Not Modified responses and skip re-downloading unchanged content.
Detect HTTP 429 (Too Many Requests) or 503 (Service Unavailable). Immediately trigger exponential backoff with random jitter and cool down the host for 30–60 minutes.
Never mirror full article bodies or steal original content. Store only canonical URLs, publication dates, and generate short 2-sentence AI summaries linking back to the original source.
The crawler pipeline isolates queue scheduling, rate-limiting, network fetching, content parsing, and AI summarization into decoupled micro-stages.
Scraping raw HTML pages is computationally heavy for target servers and fragile for crawlers. The News Els engine operates on a Feed-First Architecture:
| Ingestion Method | Server Overhead | Bandwidth Used | Politeness Rating |
|---|---|---|---|
| RSS 2.0 / Atom XML Feeds | Minimal (Static cached XML) | < 15 KB per fetch | Optimal 🟢 |
| Conditional HTTP GET (ETag / 304) | Zero processing (Header check) | < 1 KB (Headers only) | Optimal 🟢 |
| Selective HTML Scraping | Moderate (HTML Rendering) | ~100–500 KB per page | Polite Controlled 🟡 |
| Unthrottled Recursive Crawling | High (Server stress / Spike) | High bandwidth waste | Strictly Forbidden 🔴 |
To prevent any possibility of triggering a Denial-of-Service (DoS) condition on news publishers, our rate-limiter implements a Per-Domain Token Bucket pattern in memory:
// Token Bucket Rate Limiter Pseudocode for Domain Ingestion
class DomainRateLimiter {
constructor() {
this.domainQueues = new Map(); // domain -> Queue
this.minDelayMs = 3000; // Minimum 3 seconds between requests per domain
}
async fetchPolitely(targetUrl) {
const domain = new URL(targetUrl).hostname;
await this.acquireDomainLock(domain);
try {
// 1. Check robots.txt compliance
const robotsAllowed = await checkRobotsTxt(domain, targetUrl);
if (!robotsAllowed) {
console.warn(`[Robots.txt] Disallowed: ${targetUrl}`);
return null;
}
// 2. Perform conditional HTTP request with User-Agent & ETag
const response = await httpGetWithHeaders(targetUrl, {
'User-Agent': 'NewsElsBot/1.0 (+https://news.elsastry.com/bot; bot@news.elsastry.com)',
'If-None-Match': getCachedETag(targetUrl),
'If-Modified-Since': getCachedLastModified(targetUrl)
});
return response;
} finally {
// Release lock with mandatory 3-second sleep before next request to same domain
setTimeout(() => this.releaseDomainLock(domain), this.minDelayMs);
}
}
}IP bans and WAF blocks (Cloudflare, Akamai, Imperva) happen when crawlers exhibit aggressive, un-humanlike behavior. We employ these safeguard rules:
https://news.elsastry.com/bot explaining our mission and contact address.robots.txt or rate limits. If a site blocks our bot IP, respect their decision and contact the site administrator.Users want clean, fresh, daily updates without reading long wall-of-text articles. The News Els Summarizer processes raw articles into 2-sentence key digests:
Researchers have demonstrated a novel synthetic diamond matrix capable of maintaining qubit coherence at ambient temperatures for over 5 seconds. This breakthrough could drastically lower the cooling costs required for commercial quantum processors.
Every news snippet prominently displays the publisher's logo, brand name, and direct canonical link to the original article page.
We never copy-paste full article text. We generate concise, original 2-sentence bullet points summarizing key facts.
Our crawlers never bypass paywalls, subscription gates, or login screens. If content is gated, it is excluded from ingestion.
Any site administrator can email bot-optout@news.elsastry.com or add User-agent: NewsElsBot Disallow: / to immediately stop ingestion.