London as a financial centre

COLLECTED BY

Organization: Internet Archive

The Internet Archive discovers and captures web pages through many different web crawls. At any given time several distinct crawls are running, some for months, and some every day or longer. View the web archive through the Wayback Machine.

Collection: Wide Crawl started March 2011

Web wide crawl with initial seedlist and crawler configuration from March 2011. This uses the new HQ software for distributed crawling by Kenji Nagahashi.

What�s in the data set:

Crawl start date: 09 March, 2011
Crawl end date: 23 December, 2011
Number of captures: 2,713,676,341
Number of unique URLs: 2,273,840,159
Number of hosts: 29,032,069

The seed list for this crawl was a list of Alexa�s top 1 million web sites, retrieved close to the crawl start date. We used Heritrix (3.1.1-SNAPSHOT) crawler software and respected robots.txt directives. The scope of the crawl was not limited except for a few manually excluded sites.

However this was a somewhat experimental crawl for us, as we were using newly minted software to feed URLs to the crawlers, and we know there were some operational issues with it. For example, in many cases we may not have crawled all of the embedded and linked objects in a page since the URLs for these resources were added into queues that quickly grew bigger than the intended size of the crawl (and therefore we never got to them). We also included repeated crawls of some Argentinian government sites, so looking at results by country will be somewhat skewed.

We have made many changes to how we do these wide crawls since this particular example, but we wanted to make the data available �warts and all� for people to experiment with. We have also done some further analysis of the content.

If you would like access to this set of crawl data, please contact us at info at archive dot org and let us know who you are and what you�re hoping to do with it. We may not be able to say �yes� to all requests, since we�re just figuring out whether this is a good idea, but everyone will be considered.

TIMESTAMPS

Bank of England

The Bank of England, based in the City on Threadneedle Street, is the government's banker and is also the banker to the financial system more generally - the bankers' bank. From their website you can learn about the bank's relationship with the markets, banknotes, the Euro, monetary policy, the UK's foreign exchange and gold reserves.

Regulation

The Bank of England used to regulate the financial markets before the government launched the Financial Services Authority (FSA) to take control of financial regulation. The FSA is an independent non-governmental body which was given its full powers in 2001.

The British Bankers' Association (BBA, the leading trade association in the UK banking and financial services industry, is based in London. Its members, as well as many associate members, fund its not-for-profit activities.

Maritime centre

London is the world's principal centre for a wide variety of maritime industries and rivals centres such as Hong Kong, Singapore, New York and Athens. The sector contributes around £1bn each year to Britain's invisible earnings.

Many international shipping organisations have their headquarters in London, including the International Maritime Organisation (IMO). The Baltic Exchange is the only established and self-regulated global market place for shipbrokers. It provides an online exchange for ships and cargoes, real time freight derivative trading and freight market data.

Lloyd's Marine Intelligence Unit provides immediate business critical information and serves the needs of the global shipping market by supplying a source of shipping data from any worldwide location.

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2010	2011	2012

Bank of England

Regulation

Trading

Maritime centre