Common Crawl ☆

Common Crawl has archived the open web monthly since 2008 — petabytes of pages that, filtered and deduplicated, form the backbone of most pre-training corpora (GPT-3's largest component; ancestor of C4, RefinedWeb, FineWeb). A tiny nonprofit's crawler quietly became the most economically consequential dataset on Earth — and the center of the consent-and-copyright fight.