A self-healing crawler fleet for automotive market research.
Crawler Lens runs a fleet of web crawlers that collect publicly visible discussion
from automotive owner forums, so that market-research teams can measure what drivers are actually
saying about vehicles they own.
When a forum changes its layout, a crawler breaks. Rather than waiting for someone to notice,
the platform detects the failure, diagnoses which page elements moved, repairs the crawler, verifies
the repair against the live site, and records what it learned so the same break is cheaper next
time.
What it collects
Publicly visible forum posts: the text, the thread it belongs to, and its date.
The public display name attached to a post, as shown by the forum itself.
Nothing behind a login, a paywall, or a privacy setting.
No email addresses, no private messages, no personal contact details.
How it behaves
Crawls are rate-limited and scheduled to avoid loading any site heavily.
Each crawler identifies itself and collects only the pages it needs.
If a site asks us to stop, we stop. Contact details are below.
The dashboard
The operations dashboard at iq.crawlerlens.com
is a private internal tool. It requires an account, and accounts are issued only to the operators of
this platform. There is no public sign-up and no public data on it.
Details
Operated by
Asad Ikram
Purpose
Market-research data collection for a client engagement