Parse Petabytes of data from CommonCrawl in seconds
CommonCrawl is a non-profit organization that crawls millions of websites every month and stores all the data on Amazon S3. We'll take a look at how we can use the power of Amazon Athena to get all the URLS of all the websites that have been crawled by CommonCrawl.

CommonCrawl is a non-profit organization that crawls millions of websites every month and stores all the data on Amazon S3.
We'll take a look at how we can use the power of Amazon Athena to get all the URLS of all the websites that have been crawled by CommonCrawl.
AWS Athena
Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Athena is serverless, so there is no infrastructure to manage, and you pay only for the queries that you run.
Athena is easy to use. Simply point to your data in Amazon S3, define the schema, and start querying using standard SQL. Most results are delivered within seconds. With Athena, there’s no need for complex ETL jobs to prepare your data for analysis. This makes it easy for anyone with SQL skills to quickly analyze large-scale datasets.
Get Started
We are going to query the Common Crawl S3 bucket to get the list of all the domains it has crawled
Create AWS Account
Open the Athena query editor.
Region Selection
Select us-east-1 as your location as it is where the CommonCrawl data is stored. Be aware that AWS has a pricing regulation towards data going out of its network. ~0.02cts/GB.
Create Database
Run the query
CREATE DATABASE ccindex
This will create a database
Create Table
Create a new table with the following query
CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE IF NOT EXISTS ccindex (
url_surtkey STRING,
url STRING,
url_host_name STRING,
url_host_tld STRING,
url_host_2nd_last_part STRING,
url_host_3rd_last_part STRING,
url_host_4th_last_part STRING,
url_host_5th_last_part STRING,
url_host_registry_suffix STRING,
url_host_registered_domain STRING,
url_host_private_suffix STRING,
url_host_private_domain STRING,
url_protocol STRING,
url_port INT,
url_path STRING,
url_query STRING,
fetch_time TIMESTAMP,
fetch_status SMALLINT,
content_digest STRING,
content_mime_type STRING,
content_mime_detected STRING,
content_charset STRING,
content_languages STRING,
warc_filename STRING,
warc_record_offset INT,
warc_record_length INT,
warc_segment STRING)
PARTITIONED BY (
crawl STRING,
subset STRING)
STORED AS parquet
LOCATION 's3://commoncrawl/cc-index/table/cc-main/warc/';
This will map the table ccindex that your created with the location of the S3 bucket where the data is store
Match Table
Run
MSCK REPAIR TABLE ccindex
Note that you need to rerun this command every month as new data is added by the common crawl foundation.
Execute query
Run
SELECT DISTINCT(url_host_name)
FROM "ccindex"."ccindex"
WHERE crawl = 'CC-MAIN-2018-05'
AND subset = 'warc'
AND url_host_tld = 'no'
This will return all the hostname from Norway that were crawled in May 2018

SELECT COUNT(*) AS count,
url_host_registered_domain
FROM "ccindex"."ccindex"
WHERE crawl = 'CC-MAIN-2018-05'
AND subset = 'warc'
AND url_host_tld = 'no'
GROUP BY url_host_registered_domain
HAVING (COUNT(*) >= 100)
ORDER BY count DESC
This Query will return all the url_host_registered_domain count from Norway.