SocSciBot Updates

SocSciBot is updated about two times each year with minor changes and bug fixes. It has become more useful recently for link analysis because the major search engines do not allow hyperlink searches any more.

SocScibot 4 Updates

There have been a few updates to SocSciBot. The two main ones are a quick crawl button in the multiple search interface (see Tutorial 1 on the SocSciBot web site). This makes it easier to run quick practice crawls. The second change is a new button in the main link analysis screen that creates a simple network of the links between the collection of web sites crawled.

SocSciBot help manuals

SocSciBot 4 has entended tutorials and a FAQ online now. Its graph drawing tool SocSciBot Network also has an online manual now.

SocSciBot 4 freezing problem fixed

I think that the freezing problem with SocSciBot 4 has now been fixed. The new version 4.1 on the SocSciBot web site should not freeze any more. Sorry that this problem has taken so long to fix. If you are using the full version of SocSciBot 4 please email me for the update.

New SocSciBot 4 allowing multple crawls

There is a new version of SocSciBot 4 online (on the SocSciBot web site) that has a new "multiple crawl" mode. Using this mode, you can give it a set of home pages and then it will run crawls of all the sites simultaneously. This should make it easier to run projects involving many crawls of small web sites. The maximum number of URLs in total for all crawls is 900,000, with 15,000 per individual site (approximately) so it probably would not be a good idea to crawl more than 40 sites unless they are all small. Also it may take a long time to crawl many sites!

Too slow and freezing when downloading some pages

SocSciBot 4 is buggy at the moment, sorry. It is too slow but this is corrected in the newest version that should be online in the week of 10 March 2008. It also freezes when downloading some pages - this problem hasn't been solved yet but a post will go here when it has. I think this only affects 1 in 200 web sites, but am not sure yet

Welcome to the SocSciBot4 Blog

Please post any bugs or problems you have with SocSciBot4 here - these will help other users to know of any problems and the problems will eventually be picked up and solved by me. Please also feel free to respond to any other users' problems if you know of a solution.