About

Azure Search is a cloud search service for web and mobile app development. This project helps you get content from a website into an Azure Search index. It uses Abot to crawl websites. For each page it extracts the content in a customizable way and indexes it into Azure Search.

This project is intended as a demo or a starting point for a real crawler. At a minimum, you'll want to replace the console messages with proper logging, and customize the text extraction to improve results for your use case.

Howto: quick start

• Create an Azure Search search service. If you're new to Azure Search, follow this guide.
• Create an index in your search service with three string fields: "id", "url", and "content". Make them searchable.
• Run CrawlerMain, either from Visual Studio after opening the .sln file, or from the command line after compiling using msbuild. You will need to pass a few command-line arguments, such as your search service information and the root URL of the site you'd like to crawl. Calling the program without arguments or with -h will list the arguments.

Howto: customize it for your project

Text extraction

To adjust what content is extracted and indexed from each page, implement your own TextExtractor subclass. See the class documentation for more information.

CrawlerConfig

The Abot crawler is configured by the method Crawler.CreateCrawlConfiguration, which you can adjust to your liking.

Code overview

• CrawlerMain contains the setup information such as the Azure Search service information, and the main method that runs the crawler.
• The Crawler class uses Abot to crawl the given website, based off of the Abot sample. It uses a passed-in CrawlHandler to process each page it finds.
• CrawlHandler is a simple interface decoupling crawling from processing each page.
• AzureSearchIndexer is a CrawlHandler that indexes page content into AzureSearch.
• Pages are modeled by the inner class AzureSearchIndexer.WebPage. The schema of your Azure Search index must match this class.