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Spider

  • 208 installs
  • 24 repo stars
  • Updated December 19, 2025
  • johnlindquist/claude

Crawl sites or APIs to gather competitive intel, docs, or datasets that inform product decisions and early technical spikes.

About

Skill for building lightweight web spiders to collect and normalize information during research. Covers fetch strategies, parsing, deduplication, robots awareness, and export formats so agents can turn public web data into summaries, competitor briefs, or doc indexes without manual copy-paste.

  • Polite crawl limits
  • HTML extraction patterns
  • Sitemap and link following
  • Rate limiting and retries
  • Structured output for analysis

Spider by the numbers

  • 208 all-time installs (skills.sh)
  • +3 installs in the week ending Aug 2, 2026 (Skillselion tracking)
  • Ranked #584 of 2,715 Automation & Workflows skills by installs in the Skillselion catalog
  • Data as of Aug 2, 2026 (Skillselion catalog sync)
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Listed on Skillselion
Installs208
repo stars24
Last updatedDecember 19, 2025
Repositoryjohnlindquist/claude

What it does

Crawl sites or APIs to gather competitive intel, docs, or datasets that inform product decisions and early technical spikes.

Files

SKILL.mdMarkdownGitHub ↗

Web Spider

Crawl and analyze websites.

Prerequisites

# curl for fetching
curl --version

# Gemini for analysis
pip install google-generativeai
export GEMINI_API_KEY=your_api_key

# Optional: better HTML parsing
npm install -g puppeteer
pip install beautifulsoup4

Basic Crawling

Fetch Page

# Simple fetch
curl -s "https://example.com"

# With headers
curl -s -H "User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0" "https://example.com"

# Follow redirects
curl -sL "https://example.com"

# Save to file
curl -s "https://example.com" -o page.html

# Get headers only
curl -sI "https://example.com"

# Get headers and body
curl -sD - "https://example.com"

Extract Links

# Extract all links from a page
curl -s "https://example.com" | grep -oE 'href="[^"]*"' | sed 's/href="//;s/"$//'

# Filter to specific domain
curl -s "https://example.com" | grep -oE 'href="https?://example\.com[^"]*"'

# Unique links
curl -s "https://example.com" | grep -oE 'href="[^"]*"' | sort -u

Quick Site Scan

#!/bin/bash
URL=$1
echo "=== Scanning: $URL ==="

echo ""
echo "### Response Info ###"
curl -sI "$URL" | head -20

echo ""
echo "### Links Found ###"
curl -s "$URL" | grep -oE 'href="[^"]*"' | sort -u | head -20

echo ""
echo "### Scripts ###"
curl -s "$URL" | grep -oE 'src="[^"]*\.js[^"]*"' | sort -u

echo ""
echo "### Meta Tags ###"
curl -s "$URL" | grep -oE '<meta[^>]*>' | head -10

AI-Powered Analysis

Page Analysis

CONTENT=$(curl -s "https://example.com")

gemini -m pro -o text -e "" "Analyze this webpage:

$CONTENT

Provide:
1. What is this page about?
2. Key information/content
3. Navigation structure
4. Technical observations (framework, libraries)
5. SEO observations"

Security Scan

URL="https://example.com"

# Gather information
HEADERS=$(curl -sI "$URL")
CONTENT=$(curl -s "$URL" | head -1000)

gemini -m pro -o text -e "" "Security scan this website:

URL: $URL

HEADERS:
$HEADERS

CONTENT SAMPLE:
$CONTENT

Check for:
1. Missing security headers (CSP, HSTS, X-Frame-Options)
2. Exposed sensitive information
3. Potential vulnerabilities in scripts/forms
4. Cookie security settings
5. HTTPS configuration"

Extract Structured Data

CONTENT=$(curl -s "https://example.com/products")

gemini -m pro -o text -e "" "Extract structured data from this page:

$CONTENT

Extract into JSON format:
- Product names
- Prices
- Descriptions
- Any available metadata"

Multi-Page Crawling

Crawl and Analyze

#!/bin/bash
BASE_URL=$1
MAX_PAGES=${2:-10}

# Get initial links
LINKS=$(curl -s "$BASE_URL" | grep -oE "href=\"$BASE_URL[^\"]*\"" | sed 's/href="//;s/"$//' | sort -u | head -$MAX_PAGES)

echo "Found $(echo "$LINKS" | wc -l) pages"

for link in $LINKS; do
  echo ""
  echo "=== $link ==="
  TITLE=$(curl -s "$link" | grep -oE '<title>[^<]*</title>' | sed 's/<[^>]*>//g')
  echo "Title: $TITLE"
done

Sitemap Processing

# Fetch and parse sitemap
curl -s "https://example.com/sitemap.xml" | grep -oE '<loc>[^<]*</loc>' | sed 's/<[^>]*>//g'

# Crawl pages from sitemap
curl -s "https://example.com/sitemap.xml" | \
  grep -oE '<loc>[^<]*</loc>' | \
  sed 's/<[^>]*>//g' | \
  while read url; do
    echo "Processing: $url"
    # Your processing here
  done

Specific Extractions

Extract Text Content

# Remove HTML tags (basic)
curl -s "https://example.com" | sed 's/<[^>]*>//g' | tr -s ' \n'

# Using python
curl -s "https://example.com" | python3 -c "
from html.parser import HTMLParser
import sys

class TextExtractor(HTMLParser):
    def __init__(self):
        super().__init__()
        self.text = []
    def handle_data(self, data):
        self.text.append(data.strip())

p = TextExtractor()
p.feed(sys.stdin.read())
print(' '.join(filter(None, p.text)))
"

Extract API Endpoints

CONTENT=$(curl -s "https://example.com/app.js")

# Find API calls in JS
echo "$CONTENT" | grep -oE "(fetch|axios|http)\(['\"][^'\"]*['\"]" | sort -u

# AI extraction
gemini -m pro -o text -e "" "Extract API endpoints from this JavaScript:

$CONTENT

List all:
- API URLs
- HTTP methods used
- Request patterns"

Monitor Changes

#!/bin/bash
URL=$1
HASH_FILE="/tmp/page-hash-$(echo $URL | md5sum | cut -d' ' -f1)"

CURRENT=$(curl -s "$URL" | md5sum | cut -d' ' -f1)

if [ -f "$HASH_FILE" ]; then
  PREVIOUS=$(cat "$HASH_FILE")
  if [ "$CURRENT" != "$PREVIOUS" ]; then
    echo "Page changed: $URL"
    # Notify or log
  fi
fi

echo "$CURRENT" > "$HASH_FILE"

Best Practices

1. Respect robots.txt - Check before crawling 2. Rate limit - Don't overwhelm servers 3. Set User-Agent - Identify your crawler 4. Handle errors - Sites go down, pages 404 5. Cache responses - Don't re-fetch unnecessarily 6. Be ethical - Only crawl what you're allowed to 7. Check ToS - Some sites prohibit scraping

Related skills

Automation & Workflowsresearchautomationagents

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