80legs is a web crawling service that allows its users to create and run web crawls through its software as a service

Software as a Service

Software as a service , sometimes referred to as "on-demand software," is a software delivery model in which software and its associated data are hosted centrally and are typically accessed by users using a thin client, normally using a web browser over the Internet.SaaS has become a common...

 platform.

History

80legs was created by Computational Crawling, a company in Houston, TX. The company launched the private beta of 80legs in April 2009 and publicly launched the service at the DEMOfall 09 conference. At the time of its public launch, 80legs offered customized web crawling services. It has since added subscription plans and other product offerings .

Technology

80legs is built on top of a distributed grid computing

Grid computing

Grid computing is a term referring to the combination of computer resources from multiple administrative domains to reach a common goal. The grid can be thought of as a distributed system with non-interactive workloads that involve a large number of files...

network, provided by a separate company. This grid consists of approximately 50,000 individual computers, distributed across the world, and uses bandwidth monitoring technology to prevent bandwidth cap overages.