Distributed web systems

Web Crawling and Bot Detection

Crawling systems operate inside a changing technical and policy environment. Cost per page, detection behavior, and change accuracy have to be measured together.

The constraints that shape systems here

• Headless browser fleets carry high compute and memory cost
• Detection and countermeasures change without notice
• A successful fetch is not necessarily a correct observation
• Legal and ethical boundaries must be enforced in the system
• Retry and scheduling policy determine cost per useful page

Where Blobb has worked in this sector

Blobb has been engaged by a web change monitoring SaaS and has worked with distributed browser fleets, extraction pipelines, cost control, and bot detection dynamics.

Common findings

• Retry policy increases cost without improving useful coverage
• Browser work is not separated from cheaper fetch paths
• Detection response is handled manually
• Change quality lacks a stable measurement baseline

An independent assessment is often a useful first step; it can be a full architecture audit or a focused review. Related work includes performance optimization, cloud and on-premise, and the mobile platform audit.