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Web Scraping Tools That'll Save You Time On Data Extraction – Semalt Tips

Whether you are developing your own product site, working hard to add life data feeds to your application, or just want to pull out the data for research, some famous web scraping tools can save lots of time and can keep us sane. That's why we have discussed the four most powerful and useful web scraping tools that will definitely save your time and energy.

1. Uipath:

Uipath specializes in developing different automation software such as screen scraping and web scraping tools for both web and desktop. Uipath web scraper has been an ideal and perfect solution for non-programmers and non-coders. It can easily surpass the common web data extraction challenges, such as page navigations, flash digging, and PDF file scraping. You just need to open its data scraping wizard and highlight the information you want to extract. Let this tool perform its function within the set time, and the output will definitely be superb. You will soon receive proper CSV and Excel documents. With this program, you will be able to automate the form filling and navigation. Let me here tell you that its free version comes with limited features, but the premium version is a bit expensive and will not suit private blog owners or webmasters.

2. Import.io:

Import.io offers us a free desktop application and helps to scrape the data from a large number of web pages. This service treats all the web pages as the potential data sources and generates APIs for its users. In case the page you submitted was processed previously, you will get its API instantly. Otherwise, Import.io can guide us through the procedure of creating a scraping matrix with the help of connectors and extractors within 20 hours. This service is amazing and easy to use, and you don't need any technical skills at all. However, Import.io cannot navigate from one web page to another with a single click. Sometimes, it will take up to two days to submit your reports.

3. Kimono:

Kimono is a famous and one of the best web scraping tools to save your time on data extraction. This program is famous among the developers and programmers who want to empower their products without any codes. It will save your time as you can provide both positive and negative examples of training this tool. Moreover, the API is created for the web pages of your desire and the data can be labeled in any form. Kimono works quite fast and is great for getting data about stock markets and newsfeeds. Unfortunately, no page navigations are available, and we will have to spend some time to train this tool before it pulls out accurate data for you.

4. Screen Scraper:

Screen Scraper is another powerful web scraper that tackles lots of tough and complicated tasks, such as navigation, evaluation, and precise data extractions. This program requires some programming skills and can be launched instantly. Moreover, you can add the proxy, and create extracted patterns of your data within minutes. This tool works with both JavaScript and HTML. You can also try it with the Citrix platform and other similar platforms. The only con is that this is an expensive program and you may have to get basic or advanced coding skills to use the program.

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What Is A Scraper Site? – The Semalt Answer

A scraper site is the website that copies the content from other blogs and websites using some web scraping techniques. This content is mirrored with the aim of generating revenues, either via advertising or by selling the user data. Various scraper sites differ by forms and types, ranging from spam content websites to the price aggregation and shopping outlets on the internet.

Different search engines especially Google can be considered as the scraper sites. They collect content from multiple websites, save it in a database, index and present the extracted or scraped content to the users on the internet. In fact, most of the content scraped or extracted by the search engines has been copyrighted.

Made for advertising:

Some of the scraper sites are created to make money online using different advertising programs. In such circumstances, they are named as Made for AdSense websites or MFA. The derogatory term refers to the sites that don't have any redeeming value expect to attract, lure and engage the visitors to the specified websites for getting clicks on advertisements. The Made for AdSense websites and blogs are considered as the powerful search engine spam. They dilute the search results with the less-than-satisfactory results. Some scraper sites are known to link to other websites and aim to improve the search engine ranking via the private blog networks. Before Google updated its search algorithms, different types of scraper sites used to be famous among black hat SEO experts and marketers. They used this information for spamdexing and performed a variety of functions.

Legality:

The scraper sites are known to violate the copyright laws. Even taking the content from the open source sites is the copyright violation, if done in the way that does not respect any license. For example, the GNU Free Documentation License and Creative Commons ShareAlike licenses were used on Wikipedia and required that the re-publisher of Wikipedia had to inform the readers that the content was copied from the encyclopedia.

Techniques:

Techniques or methods in which the scraper websites are targeted vary from one source to another. For instance, websites with the large amount of data or content such as consumer electronics, airlines, and departmental stores, can be routinely targeted by the competitors. Their competitors want to stay informed about the current prices and market values of a brand. Another type of scraper pulls snippets and the text from sites that rank high for specific keywords. They tend to improve their rank on the search engine results page (SERP) and piggyback on the original web page's ranks. RSS feeds are also vulnerable to the scrapers. The scrapers are normally associated with the link farms and are perceived when a scraper site links to the same website again and again.

Domain hijacking:

The programmers who had created scraper sites may buy the expired domains to get them reused for SEO purposes. Such practice allows SEO experts utilize all the backlinks of that domain name. Some of the spammers try to match the topics of the expired sites and/or copy the entire content from its Internet Archive, maintaining the authenticity and visibility of that site. The hosting services often provide the facility to find the names of an expired domain, and the hackers or spammers use this information to develop their own websites.

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Web Scraping With Semalt Expert

Web scraping, also known as web harvesting, is a technique used to extract data from websites. Web harvesting software can access a web directly using HTTP or a web browser. While the process may be implemented manually by a software user, the technique generally entails an automated process implemented using a web crawler or bot.

Web scraping is a process when structured data is copied from the web into a local database for reviews and retrieval. It involves fetching a web page and extracting its content. The content of the page may be parsed, searched, restructured and its data copied into a local storage device.

Web pages are generally built out of text-based markup languages such as XHTML and HTML, both of which contain a bulk of useful data in the form of text. However, many of these websites have been designed for human end-users and not for automated use. This is the reason why scraping software was created.

There are many techniques that can be employed for effective web scraping. Some of them have been elaborated below:

1. Human Copy-and-paste

From time to time, even the best web scraping tools can't replace the accuracy and efficiency of a human's manual copy-and-paste. This is mostly applicable in situations when websites set up barriers to prevent machine automation.

2. Text Pattern Matching

This is a fairly simple but powerful approach used to extract data from web pages. It may be based on the UNIX grep command or just a regular expression facility of a given programming language, for instance, Python or Perl.

3. HTTP Programming

HTTP Programming can be used for both static and dynamic web pages. The data is extracted through posting HTTP requests to a remote web server while making use of socket programming.

4. HTML Parsing

Many websites tend to have an extensive collection of pages created dynamically from an underlying structure source such as a database. Here, data that belongs to a similar category is encoded into similar pages. In HTML parsing, a program generally detects such a template in a particular source of information, retrieves its contents and then translates it into an affiliate form, referred to as a wrapper.

5. DOM parsing

In this technique, a program embeds in a full-fledged web browser such as Mozilla Firefox or the Internet Explorer to retrieve dynamic content generated by the client-side script. These browsers may also parse web pages into a DOM tree depending on the programs that can extract parts of the pages.

6. Semantic Annotation Recognition

The pages you intend to scrape may embrace semantic markups and annotations or metadata, which may be used to locate specific data snippets. If these annotations are embedded in the pages, this technique may be viewed as a special case of DOM parsing. These annotations may also be organized into a syntactic layer, and then stored and managed separately from the web pages. It allows scrapers to retrieve data schema as well as commands from this layer before it scraps the pages.

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A Site Scraper Service Explained By Semalt

A site scraper is a type of program whose primary function is to copy content from an external website and make use of it. Site scrapers essentially have the same functions as web crawlers. Both of these programs work to index websites. However, it is important to note that web crawlers are responsible for covering the whole web, but a site scraper's main objective is to target user-specified websites.

The program purposes to mirror content from another website with the primary objective of generating revenue, often through the selling of user data and advertisements. Nonetheless, it is essential that a scraping service provider sets up a monitoring service for the target user website and ensure that the scraping setup always under maintenance.

XML, CSV, HTML

Site scrapers can download any form of data, even from entire websites. This ability largely depends on the user specifications and the program itself. After the download, the software then follows the links to another external content for further downloading. The software can save the downloaded file types in different formats such as HTML, CSV or XML files. A most popular site scraper has an additional ability to enable a user to export the files to a compatible database.

Content scraping

This is an illegal technique of stealing original content from a known or legitimate website and posting the same content to another website without obtaining the relevant permissions from the content's owner. The sole intention is to pass off the stolen content as original content, with the failure of attributing it to the owner.

Site scraping has numerous functions; the most common are plagiarism and data theft. Furthermore, it facilitates users to incorporate scraped data from other websites. A website that is made up of scraped content from other websites is known as a scraper site.

Several scraper sites are hosted all over the world. In the past, some of the scraper sites have been asked to pull down any copyrighted material, but instead of pulling them down, they just disappear or switch the domains.

Examples of site scrapers

The World Wide Web is always growing its quality and data size, which leads to the need for data enthusiasts to look for alternative platforms of extracting data from the web. Technological advancements have facilitated the development of different types of site scrapers to acquire data from a preferred website.

There are a variety of site scrapers that exist in the net today. Some of the best site scrapers that are readily available in the market today include Wget, Scraper, Web Content Extractor, Scrape Goat, Web Scraper Chrome extension, Spinn3r, ParseHub, Fminer, etc.

Nonetheless, there are other ways of site scraping. They include creating search engines and displaying snippets in one's SERPS, grabbing of a page from a website and reformatting it to create a personalized web directory, obtaining stock process from one website, and displaying the same on another one.

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Web Scraper Features – Semalt Expert

Web scraper is a Chrome browser extension aimed to extract data from web pages. With this extension, you can create a sitemap or plan, that shows the most appropriate way to navigate a site and extract data from it.

Following your sitemap, Web Scraper will navigate the source site page after page and scrape the required content. Extracted data can be exported as CSV or other formats. Besides, this extension can be installed from Chrome Store without any problem.

Some of the features of Web Scraper are outlined right below

Ability to scrape multiple pages

The tool has the ability to extract data from several web pages simultaneously if it is stipulated in the sitemap. If you need to extract all images from a 100-paged website, it may be time-consuming for you to check each of the pages and get known which ones contain images and which ones do not. So, you can instruct the tool to check every page for images.

The tool stores data in CouchDB or browser's local storage

The tool stores sitemaps and extracted data either in the local storage of the browser or CouchDB

Can extract multiple data

Since the tool can work with multiple types of data, users can select multiple types of data for extraction on the same page. For instance, it can scrape both images and text from web pages at the same time

Scrape data from dynamic pages

Web Scraper is so powerful that it can scrape data even from such dynamic pages as Ajax and JavaScript

Ability to view extracted data

The tool allows users to view scraped data even before it is saved in the designated location

It exports extracted data as CSV

Web Scraper exports extracted data as CSV by default, but it can also export it in other formats.

Exports and imports sitemaps

You may need to use sitemaps multiple times so the tool can import and export sitemaps on request.

Depends on Chrome browser only

Unfortunately, this is rather a drawback that an advantage. It works exclusively with Chrome browser.

Other data scraping tools

There are some simple data scraping tools that can be also useful for you. Some of them are listed below.

1. Scrapy

This framework can be used to scrape all the content of your website. Content scraping is not its only function. It can also be used for automated testing, monitoring, data mining, web crawling, screen scraping, and many other purposes.

2. Wget

You can also use Wget to scrape an entire website easily. But there is a little drawback with this tool, it cannot parse CSS files.

3. You can also use the following command to scrape the content of your website before pulling it apart:

file_put_contents('/some/directory/scrape_content.html', file_get_contents('http://google.com'));

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Semalt Defines Great Tools To Extract Texts From HTML Documents

Text in an HTML document is a specific type of content placed between different HTML tags (<a> </a>, <title> </title>, <b></b>, <i></i>). There are various comprehensive and powerful programs that can help to harvest all types of data, including texts, pictures, and links. Besides, any extracted data can be converted into a structured and user-friendly format. Moreover, you don't need to learn any codes, because these tools are good for anyone with no coding skill or experience.

1. Import.io:

Import.io is one of the best, most popular and useful tools that can operate in the Magic mode. The tool is quite popular because of its user-friendly interface. Using Import.io, you can point out the URL, and the program will slice and dice the information for you. It presents the content in the form of a table and comes with various pre-loading options. The data can be downloaded in the form of JSON or can be saved directly on your hard disk.

2. Octoparse:

Octoparse extracts all types of data, organizes it in structured form and helps you differentiate between the unstructured and structured data. You just need to tell the program what to do and how to extract the data both in depth and breadth. It grabs the text data that is composed of strings. This program does not support text files, videos, audio clips, and images.

3. Uipath:

With Uipath, it is easy to automate the form filling, navigation, and clicking buttons. It is an impressive, fast, simple and flexible web extractor that helps harvest useful information from HTML documents. You can save the data in the form of HTML, JSON, and Silverlight. Moreover, you can train this program to emulate human actions of different complexities.

4. Kimono:

Kimono works with scraping newsfeed and prices. This is an accurate and advanced tool to extract text from the HTML documents. In general, Kimono can pull out various data forms.

5. Screen scraper:

Screen Scraper is another useful data extraction tool. It can provide clean and neat data, as well as tackle difficulties related to data arrangement. However, it requires some programming skills to run smoothly. Moreover, this tool is a little pricey, and its free version comes with a limited number of options and features.

6. Scrapy:

Scrapy is one of the most powerful, high-end and amazing web crawling and data extraction frameworks. It is used to crawl multiple sites and can extract both structured and unstructured data per your requirements. It helps monitor and automate the data quality, ensuring that you get the best results for your online business.

7. Scraper Wiki:

Just like other similar programs, Scraper Wiki comes with numerous options. You don't need any coding skills to get the best results from this program. You can extract not only normal web pages but also the entire Wikipedia using Scraper Wiki. It is supportive for PHP, Python, and Ruby.

Hopefully, you have found something worth on this list, and we recommend you to share these cool tools with your friends.

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Web Scraper Chrome Extension Tutorial – Semalt Expert

Web Scraper is a Google Chrome extension created to scrape data from different blogs and websites. Using this plugin, you can easily create sitemaps on how your website or blog should be retrieved. With these sitemaps, webmasters, freelancers, developers, and programmers can navigate through different web pages and collect relevant data in no time.

You can easily download this extension from the Google Chrome web store. Once the installation is complete, you may use this service to capture the content of almost every image or text on a web page.

Benefits of Web Scraper plugin:

Data obtained with this Chrome extension is exported in the JSON or CSV format. Comma-separated values (CSV) files save both your money and time, and Web Scraper helps retrieve valuable information from the internet. It is not so easy to obtain, scrape and save data in a readable and usable form, but with Web Scraper, you are guaranteed to get quality results. This easy-to-install plugin can save your scraped data in the Google Drive.

Web Scraper – your problem solver:

No doubt, Web Scraper is a top-notch and comprehensive plugin. To extract data from different web pages, you just need to select and highlight the URL and let Web Scraper perform its function. Since it is an automated tool, you don't need to worry about spelling and grammatical errors or other issues. In fact, Web Scraper fixes all the major and minor errors in your data while it is being scraped. If you prefer to store the data in the Chrome local database or Couch DB, you can adjust Web Scraper settings accordingly and get your work done.

Suitable for everyone:

This tool is good for both programmers and non-programmers. If you are a non-programmer or non-coder and lack basic coding or programming skills, you don't need to panic! This Google Chrome extension will automatically collect information from the desired web pages, scrape data in a readable and scalable form, and save it in its own database for later uses.

If you were looking to hire data analysts or programmers to scrape a large number of sites, you don't need to hire anyone because Web Scraper will extract data from plenty of sites and blogs and thus save your time and money.

Backup your files:

One of the most distinctive features of Web Scraper is that it backups your files. If you have a large number of sites to be scrapped, just give Web Scraper a minute and get your well-organized data in a desirable format.

Compatible with Chrome browser

Since Web Scraper is a Google Chrome plugin, it is compatible with this browser and can perform its task conveniently. The web is packed with valuable information. However, it is not an easy task to scrape dynamic websites and pages that contain cookies, redirects, JavaScript and AJAX. With Web Scraper, you can perform multiple data scraping tasks and extract information from dynamic sites easily. Using this program, you can easily build a large number of sitemaps and scrape texts from different web pages.

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Semalt: Types Of Data You Can Extract With Web Scraping Tools

Web pages are built with text-based languages such as XHTML and HTML and contain a wealth of information in both text and image forms. Most of the web pages are designed for people, not for bots. Currently, there are various scraping tools to extract data from websites, and companies like Google, eBay or Amazon. The new forms of web scraping involve listening to the data feeds from the web servers. For instance, JSON is widely used and is a powerful transport and storage mechanism.

However, there are cases when even the best and most reliable web scraping technologies cannot replace the human's manual examination and copy-paste operations. If you are looking to scrape any type of data either manually or through software, you first have to understand what type of data can be scraped with tools like Import.io.

1. Real estate data:

The data present on the real estate websites can be extracted, and it is a huge and fast-growing web scraping area. The real estate data is frequently scraped to gather information about products and their prices, the services offered and enter the business world in no time. Almost all startups use web scraping tools to extract data from these or those real estate web pages.

2. Email Addresses gathering:

Experts and digital marketers are often hired to collect email addresses from hundreds to thousands of people. It is intended to grow and expand a business by sending bulk emails and attracting more and more customers. Data is often collected through newsletters, and it is scraped and arranged for offline uses.

3. Product Review Scrapes:

Various companies want their products to get reviewed and collect data from other similar websites using a number of web scraping tools. They aim to hold a tough competition to their rivals and want to sell particular products using this method.

4. Scraping to create duplicate websites:

Scraping is often done to create duplicate websites and blogs. For instance, if a news outlet has become famous, people can start scraping its content and stealing its articles almost daily. They don't only extract its data but also create duplicate websites for financial gains. A good example is 10bestquotes.com

5. Social media sites:

Sometimes data is collected and scraped from such social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and others. A lot of social media marketing companies and digital marketers collect information from social networking sites for personal blogs.

6. Data for research purposes:

Various scholars, students, and professors collect data in the form of journals and eBooks for educational purposes. This type of data is usually collected from the government websites and education blogs. Different research companies pay their scrapers heavily or implement powerful web scraping techniques to scrape data from the famous education blogs.

7. One time scraping:

It is when you require data from a specific site for a particular purpose and won't use it more than once. In other words, we can say that one-time scraping is done to obtain meaningful data that may not be reused ever again.

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Free Image Scraper – Semalt Advice

You may have already come across several online tools for scraping images on the web but one of the easiest tools to use for this purpose is Saveallimages. The most important reason you should use this tool is that it does not require any programming skills. And in addition, it is completely free!

The way it works:

You don't have to click on images one after the other because it's conventional and time wasting method. You only need to enter the URL or link to a website the images of which you intend to scrape in the template provided. Then, click any of the buttons offered below. The tool saves all the required images in zip files.

There are four buttons underneath and they are for different saving modes. You only need to click the most preferred option for you. The buttons are for casual, full, pagination, and aggressive image saving modes.

Casual: This mode saves all the main images on the current page.

Full: This mode is meant for saving images from thumbnails on the current page.

Pagination: This mode is for saving images on a webpage that has pagination. However, you should understand that this mode takes a relatively longer time to run.

Aggressive: This mode saves as many images as possible on the current page and related pages as well.

To use this free tool, you need to register on saveallimages.com. There are two types of memberships. You can become a free member or a premium member. In fact, it is advisable to become a free member to try the tool before upgrading your membership.

As a free member, you can only scrape 25 images per request. In addition, the images will be saved with limited features. Secondly, the images will be saved with some watermarks and ads.

On the other hand, as a premium member, you can scrape up to 1500 images per request. The images will have no watermark features and no ads. In addition, only premium members can use both pagination and aggressive save modes. You can become a premium member for just $3 per month.

The tool works well on different browsers. It supports Opera, Safari, Internet Explorer, Edge, Firefox, and Google Chrome. Besides, it works on Android, Windows and IOS. You can get it on Google Play.

It saves images with the minimum width of 150 pixels and minimum height of 150 pixels. Like all apps, it is updated regularly with more features.

In summary, the features that make "Save all images" a better application than most web scrapers are:

• It is very easy to understand and use;

• Since it saves all the images on webpage at once, it saves a lot of time;

• Even non-programmers can use it since it does not require any programming knowledge;

• You don't need to download and install any application;

• It supports all browsers and mobile platforms;

• Most importantly, it is completely free except if you want to upgrade your membership.

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Semalt Explains How To Extract Data From HTML Pages Into A PDF File

In this article, we are going to take you through the process of extracting data from your HTML pages and teach how to use the information to build a PDF file. The first step is to determine the programming tools and language that you are going to use for the task. In this case, you'd better use the Mojolicious framework of Perl.

This framework resembles Ruby on Rails even though it has additional features that could exceed your expectations. We will not be using this framework to create a new website but extract information from an already existing page. Mojolicious has excellent features to fetch and process HTML pages. It'll take you nearly 30 seconds to install this application on your machine.

Methodology

Stage One: It's important to understand the methodology you need to use when writing applications. In the first stage, you are expected to write a small ad-hoc script after getting a general idea of what you want to do and have a clear understanding of your final goal. Note that this linear code has to be straightforward without any procedures or subroutines.

Second Stage: Now you have a clear understanding of the direction you need to take and the libraries to use. It is the time to "divide and rule"! If you have accumulated codes that logically do the same things, subdivide them into subroutines. The advantage of subroutine coding is that you can make several changes without impacting other codes. It'll also provide better readability.

Stage Three: This stage allows you to componentize your codes. You can manipulate code pieces with ease after gaining the relevant experience. Now, you can cross from procedural coding to object-oriented especially if you are using an object-oriented language. Any person who uses a functional type of language can separate applications to packages or/and 'interfaces.' Why do you have to use this approach when programming? This is because you need some "breathing space" especially if you are writing a sophisticated application.

The Algorithm

After the theory, it's time to move to the current program. Here are the steps you need to undertake while implementing the web scrubber:

Create an URL list of the articles you would like to collect;

Loop over your list and fetch these URLs one after the other;

Extract your content of the HTML element;

Save your results in the HTML file;

Compile a pdf file out of your files once you have all of them ready;

Everything is as easy as ABC! Just download the web scrubber program, and you will be ready for the task.

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Semalt Suggests Best Free Web Scraping Tools To Extract Online Data

Some web scraping services are famous among users because of their marvelous data extraction options, features, and properties, while the other services are good for nothing. The web scraping services we have discussed here are not very complex, and they can easily scrape a large number of sites and blogs. It's true that there are plenty of scraping programs, but the following ones are freeware and will fulfill your business requirements.

1. Import.io

Import.io is a powerful web data extraction service that follows the simple methodologies to extract data. This can build your personal datasets and import the data from one web page to another. Plus, you can save the desired data on your hard disk, and Import.io doesn't need any code to scrape multiple web pages.

2. Scrape Box

Scrape Box is specifically designed for the SEO services and provides companies and freelancers with best data scraping services. In other words, we can say that it is both an SEO tool and a data scraper. In addition, Scrape Box can perform functions related to searching engine crawling, comment posting, link checking, keyword searching and on-page SEO.

3. CloudScrape

CloudScrape is a browser-based web scraper and online editor that helps scrape a large amount of data without any problem. It gives us the facility of saving the data on different cloud storage platforms such as Box.net and Google Drive. You can also keep your data in the form of CSV and JSON. It is one of the most powerful and comprehensive cloud-scraping services on the internet that helps to navigate through sites, fills the forms, builds robots and extracts real-time data.

4. TheWebMiner

TheWebminer is a famous online data scraping program and serves as a powerful automation and consulting service. From the real-time data to a single site, this tool provides you accurate information on a daily basis in a variety of formats. It also cleans the data by eliminating the duplicates and irrelevant content, giving you the best possible results.

5. Mozenda

Mozenda is a genuine and advanced website scraping service and data extraction tool. It is mainly recognized by different brands and comes with advanced cloud-based architecture, offering fast deployment, better scalability and easy access to multiple types of data. You can arrange your files and export them in a variety of formats using Mozenda. This program is known for its accuracy and requires no maintenance.

6. Visual Web Ripper

The Visual Web Ripper is the one-stop solution for the automated web data scraping, content extraction, and web harvesting. It is one of the most powerful web data extractors on the internet. The tool collects data in both text and image form. It then arranges the data based on your requirements and the outputs are always valuable and useful.

7. WebHose

WebHose, also called Webhose.io, is a famous web data extraction and integration program that provides easy access to the real-time and well-structured data. You can crawl thousands of sites and online resources and save the final things in more than 200 languages. It helps you cover a wide array of forums, news outlets, blogs, and online retailers.

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Semalt: Data Scraping From Website – Helpful Tools

Web scraping services and software help keep us abreast of where our company, brand or industry is going to head in next few months. They serve as powerful tools for market research and can fetch data from different data analytics providers and firms. The following free services and software not only scrape data in an hour but they collect and maintain its quality, giving an edge to your online business.

Spinn3r:

Spinn3r is one of the best and most famous services to collect and scrape data on the internet. It lets you fetch lots of information from your specified news outlets, social media sites, ATOM and RSS feeds, and private blogs. Using Spinn3r, you can extract data from over ten thousand web pages in just an hour. This service is distributed along with a firehouse API and manages more than ninety percent of the indexing work for you. Moreover, it will help remove spam and the inappropriate language users, ensuring your data safety.

Datahut:

Datahut indexes different web pages and content, submitting your sites to Google, Bing, and Yahoo. It saves your time and energy, providing you the best and most accurate data within an hour. The extracted data can be accessed in the form of JSON, and this web scraper constantly scans your files and locates updates from online resources, giving you the best possible results. Its admin area has different options to get benefited from and lets you control and crawl either a few pages or full website.

Health Data Archiver:

As the name indicates, Health Data Archiver mainly targets health and fitness websites. However, you can use this software to scrape and extract any type of blog or site within an hour. It organizes and structures your data without any cost. This program is fully trusted by world top brands and delivers ready to use data feeds, helping conduct business analysis in a short time. The best part is that this software will update you about the latest offers, ensuring that you get best out of its premium version.

Fminer:

While you are busy with developing your website, Fminer will continue extracting data for you instantly. It replaces the insecure and unsafe data with well-organized and safe data and has been trusted by different brands worldwide. Fminer is one of the easiest and coolest web crawling and scraping services. Its visual dashboard will make it easy for you to check and maintain the quality of your extracted data, giving you the best possible results in just sixty minutes.

Diggernaut:

If your data requirements and demands are high, you may try Diggernaut. It is one of the best DIY tools for data collection and extraction. Its results are always accurate, and you can customize or save the data as per your expectations and desire. With the software, the data will be organized and structured automatically, saving a lot of time and energy. Also, the flow of data is smooth and consistent as this service comes with excellent options.

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Semalt Expert Explains How To Scrape An AJAX Website Using Python

Web scraping is a method that employs the use of software to extract data from a web page. There are lots of tools to use for scraping the web with python, some of them being; Sky, Scrapy, Requests, and Beautiful Soup. However, most of these tools are limited by the fact that they only retrieve static HTML that comes from the server and not the dynamic part rendered by JavaScript.

However, there are some techniques in which this problem can be overcome:

1. Automated Browsers

You can make use of automated browsers such as Selenium or Splash which are full browsers that run headless. However, setting them up can be quite complex, and so we will focus on the second option below.

2. Intercept AJAX calls

This involves trying to intercept the AJAX calls from the page and trying to replay or reproduce them.

In this article, we will focus how to catch AJAX calls and replay them by making use of the Requests Library and Google Chrome browser. Though frameworks like Scrapy may provide you with a more efficient solution when it comes to scraping, it is not required for all cases. AJAX calls are mostly performed against an API that will return a JSON object which the Requests library can easily handle.

The first thing you need to know is that trying to replay an AJAX call is like using an undocumented API. Therefore, you have to look at all the call the pages make. You can go to the site, play with it a while and see how some information is rendered. After you are done playing, come back and start scraping.

Before we get into the details, let us first understand how the page works. If you visit a stores page by state, select any state, and the page will render information on the store. Every time you select a state, the website renders new stores to replace the old ones. This is achieved by using, and AJAX call to a server asking for the information. Our intention now is to catch that call and replay it.

To do so, all you have to do is open the Chrome browser DevTools consoled and go to the XHR subsection. XHR is an interface that performs HTTP and HTTPS requests. Thus the AJAX requests will be shown here. When you double-click the AJAX call, you will find a lot of information on the stores. You can also preview the requests.

You will note that a lot of data is sent to the server. However, don't worry since not all of it is required. To see what data you need, you can open a console and perform various post requests to the website. Now that you know how the page works and have deciphered the AJAX call, you can write your scraper.

You may be asking, 'why not use an automated browser?' The solution is simple; always try to replay the AJAX calls before embarking on something much more heavy and complicated such as an automated browser. It is simpler and lighter.

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Web Scraper Freeware – An Easy Technique For Beginners From Semalt

Information extraction from various websites, called web scraping, is quite handy when acquiring web-hosted data that APIs do not supply. For most cases, if you are looking for stand-alone data, it is much quicker to web scrape than to develop direct API connections.

Since websites already supply plenty of data, easy access is a reliable supplement for analyses, either to provide some context or to input the data for asking new questions. Despite the numerous helpful approaches to web scraping, you can utilize web scraper freeware which can further boost your efforts.

This article elaborates on the approach which is quite easy, even for a beginner. All you need to do is use Import.io for creating a specific extractor for the intended sites.

Here are the steps for you to start following right now:

Step #1: Sign Up

Visit https://www.import.io/, and click "Sign up" to register. It is quite simple to find it, this is on the top right corner of their homepage.

Step #2: Dashboard

Once you are done signing up, go to your dashboard to manage the extractors. The dashboard is at the top right corner of the homepage after you log in.

Step #3: Extractor

On the top left corner, click "New Extractor" and then paste the URL, which contains data that you intend to scrape, on the "Create Extractor" pop-up. As an example, last year's top scorers given by ESPN from last year in tabulated form. Although users tend to bet high, and the stakes are just as considerable, you have to get it correct on your first time. With web scraper freeware, it is possible for you to find information that will enable you to stay among the top teams.

Step #4: Data Viewing and Sorting

Sooner or later, Import.io will finish scraping all data from the selected website. "Data View" will display it for you. On this portion, you can add, remove, or even rename table's columns by choosing elements on the site. This enhances the arrangement of your dataset before you begin to generate the live query API URL. Lastly, you would not even have any trouble performing such tasks in the Designer.

Step #5: Import Data

When the data is ready to be imported, click the "Done" button, which you will see in the top right corner, and it is colored red. View the extractor you made in the previous step on the Dashboard. Next, you select the extractor and click the "Integrate" button. You can find it below the name of the extractor, then you copy-paste the "Live Query API" that you can see here, onto a browser window. By doing so, you can either copy the JSON response with your data, or you may use the "Download Tool."

At this point, you should have a live query API for your website. You can try other sites as well using the extractor. To learn more, just check out the Import.io community, for more web scraper freeware techniques.

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Semalt Expert Explains How To Scrape A Website With Beautiful Soup

There is a lot of data that is usually on the other side of an HTML. To a computer machine, a webpage is just a mixture of symbols, text characters, and white space. The actual thing we go to get on a web page is only content in a manner that is readable to us. A computer defines these elements as HTML tags. The factor which distinguishes the raw code from the data we see is the software, in this case, our browsers. Other websites such as scrapers may utilize this concept to scrape a website content and save it for later use.

In plain language, if you open an HTML document or a source file for a particular webpage, it would be possible to retrieve the content present on that specific website. This information would be on a flat landscape together with a lot of code. The whole process involves dealing with the content in an unstructured manner. However, it is possible to be able to organize this information in a structured way and retrieve useful parts from the entire code.

In most cases, scrapers do not perform their activity to achieve a string of HTML. There is usually an end benefit which everyone tries to reach. For instance, people who perform some internet marketing activities may need to include unique strings like command-f to get the information from a webpage. To complete this task on multiple pages, you may need assistance and not just the human capabilities. Website scrapers are these bots which can scrape a website with over a million pages in a matter of hours. The entire process requires a simple program-minded approach. With some programming languages like Python, users can code some crawlers which can scrape a website data and dump it on a particular location.

Scrapping might be a risky procedure for some websites. There are a lot of concerns revolving around the legality of scraping. First of all, some people consider their data private and confidential. This phenomenon means that copyright issues, as well as leakage of exceptional content, could occur in the event of scrapping. In some cases, people download an entire website for using offline. For instance, in the recent past, there was a Craigslist case for a website called 3Taps. This site was scraping website content and republishing housing listings to the classified sections. They later settled with 3Taps paying $1,000,000 to their former sites.

BS is a set of tools (Python Language) such as a module or package. You can use Beautiful Soup to scrape a website from data pages on the web. It is possible to scrape a site and get the data in a structured form which matches your output. You can parse a URL and then set a specific pattern including our export format. In BS, you can export in a variety of formats such as XML. To get started, you need to install a decent version of BS and begin with a few Python basics. Programming knowledge is essential here.

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Semalt Expert On Website Data Scraping - Good And Bad Bots

Web scraping has been around for a long time and is regarded useful for webmasters, journalists, freelancers, programmers, non-programmers, marketing researchers, scholars and social media experts. There are two types of bots: good bots and bad bots. The good bots enable the search engines to index the web content and are given high preference by the market experts and digital marketers. The bad bots, on the other hand, are useless and aim to damage a site's search engine ranking. The legality of web scraping depends on what type of bots you have had used.

For instance, if you are using the bad bots that fetch the content from different web pages with the intention of using it illegally, the web scraping may be harmful. But if you make use of the good bots and avoid the harmful activities including the denial of service attacks, online frauds, competitive data mining strategies, data thefts, account hijacks, unauthorized vulnerability scan, digital ad frauds, and stealing of the intellectual properties, then the web scraping procedure is good and helpful to grow your business on the Internet.

Unfortunately, most of the freelancers and startups love bad bots because they are a cheap, powerful and comprehensive way to collect data without any need for a partnership. Big companies, however, use the legal web scrapers for their gains and don't want to ruin their reputation on the Internet with illegal web scrapers. The general opinions on the legality of web scraping do not seem to matter because in the past few months it has become clear that the federal court systems are cracking down more and more illegal web scraping strategies.

Web scraping began as an illegal process back in 2000, when the use of bots and spiders to scrape websites was considered nonsense. Not many practices were adapted to stop this procedure from spreading on the internet until 2010. eBay first filed the preliminary injunctions against Bidder's Edge, claiming that the use of bots on the website had violated the Trespass to Chattels laws. The court soon granted the injunctions because the users had to agree the terms and conditions of the site and a large number of bots were deactivated as they could be destructive for eBay's computer machines. The lawsuit was soon settled out of the court, and eBay stopped everyone from using bots for web scraping no matter they are good or bad.

In 2001, a travel agency had sued the competitors who scraped its content from the website with the help of harmful spiders and bad bots. The judges again took measures against the crime and favored the victims, saying that both web scraping and the use of bots could harm various online businesses.

Nowadays, for academic, private and information aggregation, a lot of people rely on fair web scraping procedures, and a lot of web scraping tools have been developed in this regard. Now the officials say that not all of those tools are reliable, but the ones that come in paid or premium versions are better than the free web scrapers.

In 2016, Congress had passed the first legislation to target the bad bots and favor the good bots. The Better Online Ticket Sales (BOTS) Act was formed which banned the use of illegal software that could target the websites, damaging their search engine ranks and destroying their businesses. There're matters of fairness. For instance, LinkedIn has spent lots of money on the tools that block or eliminate bad bots and encourage good bots. As the courts have been trying to decide the legality of web scraping, the companies are having their data stolen.

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Semalt: How To Use The Python To Scrape A Website?

Data plays a critical role in investigations, doesn't it? It can lead to a new way of looking at things and develop other insights. The most unfortunate thing is that the data you are looking for is not usually readily available. You can find it on the Internet, but it may not be in a format that is downloadable. In such a case, you can use the web scraping technique to program and gather the data you need.

There are several scraping approaches and programming languages that can be of help through this process. This article will guide you on how to use the python language to scrap a site. You will gain a lot of insights on the operation of web pages. You will also get to understand how developers structure data on any website.

The best starting point is to download and install the Anaconda Python Distribution on your computing machine. You can also take some tutorials on the basics of this programming language. The best place to set off could be Codecademy especially if you have no idea in this field.

This guide will make use of the Polk Country current listing site for inmates. We will guide you on how to use a Python script to extract a list of inmates and get some data like the city of residence and race for each inmate. The whole script that we will be taking you through is stored and open at GitHub. This is one of the popular online platforms that allow sharing of computer codes. The codes have a long list of commentary that can be of great help to you.

When scraping any site, the first tool to look for is a web browser. Most of the browsers will give users HTML inspection tools that assist in lifting engine-bay hatch and getting to understand the page structure. The way you access each tool varies from one browser to another. However, the mainstay is the 'view page source, and you can get it by right-clicking on the page directly.

As you view the HTML source of the page, it is advisable to neatly list the details of the links to the inmate in table rows. The next step is to write a script that we are going to use to extract this information. The two Python packages that we are going to use in the heavy lifting process are the Beautiful Soup and Requests. Make sure you install them before you begin to run the code.

The web scraping script will do three things. These include loading the listing pages and extraction of links to the details pages, loading each detail page and extracting data, and printing the extracted data depending on how it is filtered like the city of residence and race. Once you understand this, the next step is to begin the coding process by using the Beautiful Soup and Requests.

Firstly, logically load the inmate listing page using the requests.get URL and then use the beautiful soup to purse it. After that, we extract the link to the details pages by looping through each row. After parsing the inmate details, the next step is to extract the sex, age, race, booking time, and name values to the dictionary. Each inmate will get his dictionary, and all the dictionaries will get appended to the inmate's list. Finally, loop over the race and city values before you finally print out your list.