This is a guest blog post by Ross Fairbanks, a software developer based in Barcelona. He mainly develops in Ruby and is interested in open data and cloud computing. This guest post describes his open data project and why he built it.

The Dark Side of Open Data - via Forbes: “There’s no reason to doubt that opening to the public of data previously unreleased by governments, if well managed, can be a boon for the economy and, ultimately, for the citizens themselves. It wouldn’t hurt, however, to strip out the grandiose rhetoric that sometimes surrounds them, and look, case by case, at the contexts and motivations that lead to their disclosure.”

One of the biggest boons for the Open Data movement in recent years has been the enthusiastic support from all levels of government for releasing more, and higher quality, datasets to the public. In May 2013, the White House released its Open Data Policy and announced the launch of Project Open Data, a repository of tools and information--which anyone is free to contribute to--that help government agencies release data that is “available, discoverable, and usable.”

The crawl archive for December 2014 is now available! This crawl archive is over 160TB in size and contains 2.08 billion webpages.

Big data has the potential to change the world. The talent exists and the tools are already there. What’s lacking is access to data. Imagine the questions we could answer and the problems we could solve if talented, creative technologists could freely access more big data.

The crawl archive for November 2014 is now available! This crawl archive is over 135TB in size and contains 1.95 billion webpages.

The crawl archive for October 2014 is now available! This crawl archive is over 254TB in size and contains 3.72 billion webpages.

The second crawl of 2013 is now available! In late November, we published the data from the first crawl of 2013. The new dataset was collected at the end of 2013, contains approximately 2.3 billion webpages and is 148TB in size.

This is a guest blog post by Robert Meusel, a researcher at the University of Mannheim in the Data and Web Science Research Group and a key member of the Web Data Commons project. The post below describes a new tool produced by Web Data Commons for extracting data from the Common Crawl data.

The crawl archive for September 2014 is now available! This crawl archive is over 220TB in size and contains 2.98 billion webpages.

The August crawl of 2014 is now available! The new dataset is over 200TB in size containing approximately 2.8 billion webpages.

The July crawl of 2014 is now available! The new dataset is over 266TB in size containing approximately 3.6 billion webpages.

The March crawl of 2014 is now available! The new dataset contains approximately 2.8 billion webpages and is about 223TB in size.

The April crawl of 2014 is now available! The new dataset is over 183TB in size containing approximately 2.6 billion webpages.

Wait, what's WAT, WET and WARC? Recently CommonCrawl has switched to the Web ARChive (WARC) format. The WARC format allows for more efficient storage and processing of CommonCrawl's free multi-billion page web archives, which can be hundreds of terabytes in size.

We are very please to announce that new crawl data is now available! The data was collected in 2013, contains approximately 2 billion web pages and is 102TB in size (uncompressed).

Last year we transitioned from our custom crawler to the Apache Nutch crawler to run our 2013 crawls as part of our migration from our old data center to the cloud. Our old crawler was highly tuned to our data center environment where every machine was identical with large amounts of memory, hard drives and fast networking.

The talented team at Web Data Commons recently extracted and analyzed the hyperlink graph within the Common Crawl 2012 corpus. Altogether, they found 128 billion hyperlinks connecting 3.5 billion pages.

A couple months ago we announced the creation of the Common Crawl URL Index and followed it up with a guest post by Jason Ronallo describing how he had used the URL Index. Today we are happy to announce a tool that makes it even easier for you to take advantage of the URL Index!

Sebastian Spiegler is the head of the data team and SwiftKey and a volunteer at Common Crawl. Yesterday we posted Sebastian’s statistical analysis of the 2012 Common Crawl corpus. Today we are following it up with a great video featuring Sebastian talking about why crawl data is valuable, his research, and why open data is important.

We are extremely happy to announce that Professor Jim Hendler has joined the Common Crawl Advisory Board.  Professor Hendler is the Head of the Computer Science Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and also serves as the Professor of Computer and Cognitive Science at RPI’s Tetherless World Constellation.

This year's Strata Conference teams up with Hadoop World for what promises to be a powerhouse convening in NYC from October 23-25. Check out their full announcement below and secure your spot today.

Want to know more detail about what data is in the 2012 Common Crawl corpus without running a job? Now you can thanks to Sebastian Spiegler!

Last week we announced the Common Crawl URL Index. The index has already proven useful to many people and we would like to share an interesting use of the index that was very well described in a great blog post by Jason Ronallo.

We are very excited to announce the Norvig Web Data Science Award! Common Crawl and SARA created the award to encourage research in web data science.

We are very excited to announce that the winners of the Norvig Web Data Science Award Lesley Wevers, Oliver Jundt, and Wanno Drijfhout from the University of Twente!

We are thrilled to announce that Common Crawl now has a URL index! Scott Robertson, founder of triv.io graciously donated his time and skills to creating this valuable tool.

This is a guest blog post by Matthew Berk, Founder of Lucky Oyster. Matthew has been on the front lines of search technology for the past decade.

We are very excited to announce that blekko is donating search data to Common Crawl! Founded in 2007, blekko has created a new type of search experience that enlists human editors in its efforts to eliminate spam and personalize search.

We’re very excited to announce the winners of the First Ever Common Crawl Code Contest! We were thrilled by the response to the contest and the many great entries. Several people let us know that they were not able to complete their project in time to submit to the contest. We’re currently working with them to finish the projects outside of the contest and we’ll be showcasing some of those projects in the near future!

Do you have a project that you are working on for the Common Crawl Code Contest that is not quite ready? If so, you are not the only one. A few people have emailed us to let us know their code is almost ready but they are worried about the deadline, so we have decided to extend the deadline through the holiday weekend.

The prize package for the Common Crawl Code Contest now includes three Nexus 7 tablets thanks to TalentBin!

I am very happy to announce that Common Crawl has released 2012 crawl data as well as a number of significant enhancements to our example library and help pages.

Did you know that every entry to the First Ever Common Crawl Code Contest gets $50 in Amazon Web Services (AWS) credits? If you're a developer interested in big datasets and learning new platforms like Hadoop, you truly have no reason not to try your hand at creating an entry to the code contest!

We are excited to announce that Mat Kelcey has joined the Common Crawl Board of Advisors! Mat has been extremely helpful to Common Crawl over the last several months and we are very happy to have him as an official Advisor to the organization.

There is still plenty of time left to participate in the Common Crawl code contest! The contest is accepting entries until August 30th, why not spend some time this week playing around with the Common Crawl corpus and then submit your work to the contest?

Big Data Week aims to connect data enthusiasts, technologists, and professionals across the globe through a series of meet-ups. The idea is to build community among groups working on big data and to spur conversations about relevant topics ranging from technology to commercial use cases.

We're just one month away from one of the biggest and most exciting events of the year, O'Reilly's Open Source Convention (OSCON). This year's conference will be held July 16th-20th in Portland, Oregon.

Common Crawl has started talking with the Open Cloud Consortium (OCC) about working together. If you haven’t already heard of the OCC, it is an awesome nonprofit organization managing and operating cloud computing infrastructure that supports scientific, environmental, medical and health care research.

The following is a guest blog post by Pete Warden, a member of the Common Crawl Advisory Board. Pete is a British-born programmer living in San Francisco. After spending over a decade as a software engineer, including 5 years at Apple, he’s now focused on a career as a mad scientist.

At Common Crawl we've been busy recently! After announcing the release of 2012 data and other enhancements, we are now excited to share with you this short video that explains why we here at Common Crawl are working hard to bring web crawl data to anyone who wants to use it.

We're looking for students who want to try out the Apache Hadoop platform and get a technical report published.

Next week a few members of the Common Crawl team are going the Data 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.

As part of our ongoing effort to grow Common Crawl into a truly useful and innovative tool, we recently formed an Advisory Board to guide us in our efforts. We have a stellar line-up of advisory board members who will lend their passion and expertise in numerous fields as we grow our vision.

Common Crawl is thrilled to announce that our data is now hosted on Amazon Web Services' Public Data Sets.

For the last few months, we have been talking with Chris Bizer and Hannes Mühleisen at the Freie Universität Berlin about their work and we have been greatly looking forward the announcement of the Web Data Commons.

Common Crawl on building an open Web-Scale crawl using Hadoop.

Hear Common Crawl founder discuss how data accessibility is crucial to increasing rates of innovation as well as give ideas on how to facilitate increased access to data.

Nova and Gil, in discussion with host Jason Calacanis, explore in depth what Common Crawl is all about and how it fits into the larger picture of online search and indexing.

Learn how you can harness the power of MapReduce data analysis against the Common Crawl dataset with nothing more than five minutes of your time, a bit of local configuration, and 25 cents.

A little under four years ago, Gil Elbaz formed the Common Crawl Foundation. He was driven by a desire to ensure a truly open web. He knew that decreasing storage and bandwidth costs, along with the increasing ease of crunching big data, made building and maintaining an open repository of web crawl data feasible.

Nova and Gil, in discussion with host Jason Calacanis, explore in depth what Common Crawl is all about and how it fits into the larger picture of online search and indexing. Underlying their conversation is an exploration of how Common Crawl's open crawl of the web is a powerful asset for educators, researchers, and entrepreneurs.

Common Crawl aims to change the big data game with our repository of over 40 terabytes of high-quality web crawl information into the Amazon cloud, the net total of 5 billion crawled pages.

In this post we respond to the most common questions. Thanks for all the support and please keep the questions coming!

We have started a Common Crawl discussion list to enable discussions and encourage collaboration between the community of coders, hackers, data scientists, developers and organizations interested in working with open web crawl data.