# Common Crawl

Hacker Approved page: https://hackerapproved.com/p/common-crawl/

13 people recommended Common Crawl in Hacker News comments, 4 had mixed feelings and 6 criticized it, November 2025 to October 2026. It was recommended in 8 of 12 months, in 13 threads. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Free web archive that people use instead of crawling sites themselves; critics say it is sampled, monthly and less fresh than rivals.

Summary written by Claude from 28 comments. It was written before the November 2026 recount, and 26 of those comments still count.

## Why people recommend it

- Saves crawling the web yourself (3 comments in the sample): "I feel using something that already exists will be more cooperative and considerate than everyone overloading every website with their spider." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47132871)) "I think we can get by with using CommonCrawl, pulling every few months the fresh content and updating the search stubs." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46538835)) "they'd just pull down a copy of Common Crawl like every other major data analysis project" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47995299))
- Free, open data for research (2 comments in the sample): "public exchange of data is great for innovation and research" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49615540)) "great resource. Common crawl is a goldmine" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47793906))
- Good quality pages, little spam (2 comments in the sample): "the data that I’ve experimented with from 2014 seemed high quality, with very little spam" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47785782)) "I was surprised by how many of them seemed high quality" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48226990))

## What people warn about

- Sampled, monthly, less fresh than rivals (4 comments in the sample): "probably doesn’t make sense on its own due to low update frequency (monthly) and somewhat limited crawl scope" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48014696)) "Common Crawl is a sample of the web, so it's not that directly helpful" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47907853)) "CC is not on the same scale as Google and not nearly as fresh." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46538864))
- Site owners object to scraping (4 comments in the sample): "I'm not interested in participating in your project, block CCBot in robots.txt, and have requested deletion of my data" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47020544)) "They outsource their dirty and ethically questionable data collection to a "non-profit" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45845414)) "its product is unlawful reproductions of copyrighted data for commercial use" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48462600))

## The badge

A product earns the Hacker Approved badge when at least 10 people recommend it, recommenders outnumber critics at least 2 to 1 (mixed feelings count toward neither side), it was recommended in at least 4 of the 12 months and in at least 5 different threads, and no single thread supplies more than half of the people who recommend it. Health and money products are never badged.

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Common Crawl", https://hackerapproved.com/p/common-crawl/ (13 recommend, 4 mixed, 6 criticize; Hacker News comments, November 2025 to October 2026).

Counts updated 2 Nov 2026, with data through October 31, 2026.