I need a library (hopefully in C#!) which works as a web crawler to access HTTP files and FTP files. In principle, I'm happy with reading HTML, I want to extend it to PDF, WORD, etc..
I'm happy with a starter's open source software or at least any directions for documentation.
Check NCrawler project
Simple and very efficient multithreaded web crawler with pipeline based processing written in C#. Contains HTML, Text, PDF, and IFilter document processors and language detection(Google). Easy to add pipeline steps to extract, use and alter information.
I have developed the Crawler Engine of the Crawler-Lib Framework. It is a workflow enabled crawler which can easily extended to do any kind of requests or even processing you want to have.
Here is the engine:
http://www.crawler-lib.net/crawler-lib-engine
Here are some Youtube Videos, showing how the Crawler-Lib engine works:
http://www.youtube.com/user/CrawlerLib
I know this project is not open source, but there is a free version.