At a glance
Common Crawl vs askFinz
Row by row — reach, freshness and what you get back.
| Compared on | Common Crawl | askFinz |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | Free and open | $0.75 top-up · $1.00 with the extension or a paid plan · $3.50 standalone, per 1,000 searches |
| Format | Raw WARC / WAT / WET files | Filed as what it is — a judgment, a standard, a filing, with its identifier |
| Freshness | A snapshot from whenever that crawl ran | Continuous reading, not a scheduled rebuild |
| Structuring | Left entirely to whoever downloads it | Already done |
| Documents, not just captures | Bytes as captured; parsing is yours | PDFs, Office files, ebooks and data files converted to readable text and read |
| Querying | None built in — you build your own index | Answers grounded in the index, with the passage and the address it was read from |
| Where it is used | A corpus you download and process | Workspaces, a browser extension and a desktop app, on one sign-in |
| Best at | Large-scale research and model training | Getting a current answer with its source |
Swipe the table sideways to see both columns.
What Common Crawl is
Common Crawl publishes large, periodic snapshots of the web as raw WARC, WAT and WET files, freely available for anyone to download and process. It is a genuine public good — much of the open web, captured on a recurring cadence, unencumbered — and it underpins an enormous amount of open research and model training precisely because it is free and large.
It arrives as raw crawl data. Parsing, deduplicating, structuring and indexing it into something searchable is left to whoever downloads it, and whatever you build is only as current as the last archive you pulled.
What askFinz is
askFinz does not publish dumps. It runs its own web index, read continuously and ahead of the question rather than rebuilt on a schedule, with a Search workspace, Research, Chat, Code and News, a browser extension, a desktop app and research agents already built on top — the same index and one sign-in — so the parsing and structuring are done before you ask. A question returns the matched passage and the address it was read from, out of an index kept as separate collections filed by what each document actually is: a judgment, a standard, a filing or a clinical study comes back as that kind of record with its identifier attached. PDFs, Office files, ebooks and data files are converted to readable text and read, rather than left as bytes for a downstream project to interpret. askFinz does not sell index access as a standalone feed or API.
Two gaps: age, and shape
A Common Crawl archive tells you what the web looked like on the day it was captured. That is exactly right for research and exactly wrong for a question about something that has changed since.
The second gap is shape. A raw WARC file does not know whether a page is a court filing, a product listing or a blog post, so working that out is your project's job. askFinz files what it reads as the kind of document it actually is, so the question "show me the standard, not the blog post about the standard" is answerable.
Two different jobs
One hands you material to process. The other has already read it.
Choose Common Crawl if
- You are training or evaluating models at scale, where a recent snapshot is the correct input and free is unbeatable.
- You need the raw bytes — headers, redirects, the whole capture — not a cleaned passage.
- Reproducibility matters: a fixed archive is citable and re-runnable in a way a live index is not.
- You want to build your own index on purpose and need a corpus to build it from.
- You have no budget. Common Crawl costs nothing and askFinz cannot compete with that.
Choose askFinz if
- Your question is about something that may have changed since the last archive was published.
- You want an answer with the passage it came from, and the address it was read from, not a corpus to process first.
- You do not want to own parsing, deduplication, ranking and refresh as a project.
- You want content filed by what it actually is, with its identifier, rather than as undifferentiated captures.
- You want search to be a place people work — a workspace, a browser extension and a desktop app on one sign-in — rather than a pipeline you maintain.
- The answer needs somewhere to go — Research with sources attached, Storage, a project.
FAQ
Questions people ask
The things people actually ask before choosing between Common Crawl and askFinz.
5 questions · open one to read the answer
Yes, entirely. That is a real advantage and this page does not argue against it.
As current as the crawl that produced it. Between publications, nothing in it moves.
Not without building the index yourself. The archive is raw crawl data; querying it is a project.
No. It does not sell or publish index access as a standalone feed.
Common Crawl. It is designed for that, it is free, and it is citable. askFinz is not a training corpus.
See how the index works, or read the fuller case for a continuously-read index. Join the beta and try it against a real question.