Rich Skrenta

Career

Before leading Common Crawl, Skrenta created the blekko search engine and founded the Open Directory Project. In 2012 blekko donated crawl metadata gathered between February and October of that year to Common Crawl, to help improve its crawl.²

Skrenta became Executive Director of Common Crawl in 2023. The foundation's history says the organization then expanded its staff, public engagement and research collaborations, and later work includes the Web Languages Project and the CommonLID language-identification benchmark.²¹

Work and contributions

• Common Crawl corpus Open data

  Leads the foundation that maintains an open repository of web crawl data collected since 2008, published roughly once a month and hosted through the AWS Open Data Sponsorship Program.²¹

• blekko Proprietary product

  Created the blekko search engine, which in 2012 donated crawl metadata to Common Crawl to improve crawl quality and reduce spam.²

Timeline

1. 2012The blekko search engine, created by Skrenta, donated crawl metadata to Common Crawl.²
2. 2023Became Executive Director of the Common Crawl Foundation.²
3. Dec 2024Common Crawl launched the Web Languages Project to broaden non-English coverage.²

Where they work

• Common Crawl 3 people in the wiki

Related people

• Gil ElbazAlso at Common Crawl
• Greg LindahlAlso at Common Crawl
• Benoit DagevilleDatasets and data
• Piotr DollárDatasets and data
• Hynek KydlíčekDatasets and data
• Kezhi KongDatasets and data
• Rangan MajumderDatasets and data
• George HalalDatasets and data
• T.R. VishwanathDatasets and data
• Luke BarousseDatasets and data