Yes you can! Our indexes are persisted in Lucene format internally. Nobody has asked to download an index but if they asked we'd make it available.

Another problem is 80legs will only crawl pages <100kb with the free/contest plan. This means it is useless for all but the smallest pages.

Er.. not true, the contest plan (which is different from the free plan) allows up to 10 MB download. Registered contestants should have access to their plans within an hour of registering.

And if you don't have it, just contact us: http://www.80legs.com/contact.html.

Ah, awesome, thank you for the correction, this allows me to continue with my plan. I said that within an hour of registering, but had asked on their support page as well.