Crawling is harder than it looks
glinden.blogspot.com
glinden.blogspot.com
I architected and implemented a crawler, reading this documents really confirmed problems encountered and taught me a thing or two on how to improve.
This document goes the same scope as: Why Writing Your Own Search Engine is Hard - by Anna Patterson, Stanford University (http://www.acmqueue.org/modules.php?name=Content&pa=show...) for those interested in search engines.
(Just in case someone mistakes this for seriousness, I did RTFA)