Common Crawl
Petabytes of crawled web pages released free for anyone to analyse. Most of the language models you have used started here.
Opens in a new tab. We do not control this site and it may have changed since we catalogued it.
How to get the most from it
Common Crawl sits in Web Archives under Retro, filed as rabbit hole.
- Open it when the evening is free. It has no natural stopping point.
- Use a laptop or desktop computer — we file it as desktop only.
- It works with the sound off, so it is fine on a train or in a quiet office.
- No account needed — you can start without signing up.
- Go in expecting something brainy and useful.
About this category: Archives, dead websites brought back and search pointed at the past. What the web looked like before it settled down.
Good for
- A long evening with nothing planned
- Giving your brain a workout
- Getting something practical done
- A quiet break at your desk
- Trying it with zero commitment
Common Crawl: quick answers
Is Common Crawl free?
Yes. Common Crawl is free to use and needs no account.
Do I need an account to use Common Crawl?
No. You can use Common Crawl without signing up for anything.
Does Common Crawl work on a phone?
Not well. We file Common Crawl as desktop only, so open it on a laptop or desktop computer.
Is Common Crawl safe for work?
Yes, we file it as safe for work. It also works muted.
How long does Common Crawl take?
We file it as "Rabbit hole": Clear your evening. We warned you.
More in Web Archives
All 12 in Web ArchivesRecords a page as you browse it, capturing the parts a crawler cannot — logged-in views, video, anything behind a click.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Archived research papers, including preprints and journals that have since folded, kept readable rather than merely cited.
- 10 min
Thematic collections captured around elections, disasters and cultural moments, chosen by librarians rather than by a crawler.
- 10 min
Browses the archives through emulated period browsers, so an old page renders the way it did rather than the way Chrome guesses.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Same mood: brainy
All brainy sitesInteractive models of what complexity science likes best — epidemics, flocking, synchronisation, forest fires.
- 1 hr+
- Desktop
Sixteen words, four hidden groups, four mistakes allowed. The traps are the entire point and they are very carefully set.
- 2 min
Risk on hundreds of user-drawn maps, played slowly against a community that has been arguing about dice odds since 2006.
- 1 hr+
- Desktop
Guess the secret word and be told only how semantically close you got. Rank 4,000 feels like progress, and it very much is not.
- 10 min
Keep exploring
Category
Time and mood
Have a site of your own? Suggest it for Detour or browse the AltFTool backlinks hub.