OK, the real title is: Twelve steps to running your Ruby code across five billion web pages
From the post:
Common Crawl is one of those projects where I rant and rave about how world-changing it will be, and often all I get in response is a quizzical look. It's an actively-updated and programmatically-accessible archive of public web pages, with over five billion crawled so far. So what, you say? This is going to be the foundation of a whole family of applications that have never been possible outside of the largest corporations. It's mega-scale web-crawling for the masses, and will enable startups and hackers to innovate around ideas like a dictionary built from the web, reverse-engineering postal codes, or any other application that can benefit from huge amounts of real-world content.
Rather than grabbing each of you by the lapels individually and ranting, I thought it would be more productive to give you a simple example of how you can run your own code across the archived pages. It's currently released as an Amazon Public Data Set, which means you don't pay for access from Amazon servers, so I'll show you how on their Elastic MapReduce service.
I'm grateful to Ben Nagy for the original Ruby code I'm basing this on. I've made minimal changes to his original code, and built a step-by-step guide describing exactly how to run it. If you're interested in the Java equivalent, I recommend this alternative five-minute guide.
A call to action and an awesome post!
If you have ever forwarded a blog post, forward this one.
This would make a great short course topic. Will have to give that some thought.