Web scraping, also known as Web harvesting, Web data extraction, is the process of obtaining and analyzing data from a website. After that, for various purposes, the extracted data is saved in a local database. Web crawling can be performed manually or automatically through the software. There is no doubt that automated processes are more cost-effective than manual processes. Because there is a large amount of digital information online, companies equipped with these tools can collect more data at a lower cost than they did not collect, and gain a competitive advantage in the long run.

Web scraping benefits businesses > HOW!

Modern companies build the best data. Although the Internet is actually the largest database in the world, the Internet is full of unstructured data, which organizations cannot use directly. Web scraping can help overcome this hurdle and turn the site into structured data, which in many cases is of great value. The benefits of sales and marketing of a specific type of web scraping are contact scraping, which can collect business contact information from websites. This helps to attract more sales leads, close more deals, and improve marketing. By using a web scraper to monitor job commission updates, recruiters can find ideal candidates with very specific searches. By monitoring job board updates with a web scrape, recruiters are able to find their ideal candidates with very specific searches. Financial analysts use web scraping to collect data about global stock markets, financial markets, transactions, commodities, and economic indicators to make better decisions. E-commerce / travel sites get product prices and availability from competitors and use the extracted data to maintain a competitive advantage. Get data from social media and review sites (Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, etc.). Monitor the impact of your brand and take your brand reputation / customer review department to a new level. It's also a great tool for data scientists and journalists. An automatic web scraping can collect millions of data points in your database in just a few minutes. This data can be used to support the data model and academic research. Moreover, if you are a journalist, you can collect rich data online to practice data-driven journalism.

Web scraping tools List.....

In many cases, you can use a web crawler to extract website data for your own use. You can use browser tools to extract data from the website you are browsing in a semi-automatic way, or you can use free API/paid services to automate the crawling process. If you are technically proficient, you can even use programming languages like Python to develop your own web dredging applications.

No matter what your goal is, there are some tools that suit your needs. This is our curated list of top web crawlers.

Scraper site API

License:     FREE 

Website: https://www.scrapersite.com/

Scraper site enables you to create scalable web detectors. It can handle proxy, browser, and verification code on your behalf, so you can get data from any webpage with a simple API call.

The location of the scraper is easy to integrate. Just send your GET request along with the API key and URL to their API endpoint and they'll return the HTML.

Scraper site is an extension for Chrome that is used to extract data from web pages. You can make a site map, and how and where the content should be taken. Then you can export the captured data to CSV.

Web Scraping Function List:

Checking in multiple pages

Dental data stored in local storage

Multiple data selection types

Extract data from dynamic pages (JavaScript + AJAX)

Browse the captured data

Export the captured data to CSV

Importing and exporting websites

It depends on Chrome browser only

The Chrome extension is completely free to use

Highlights: sitemap, e-commerce website, mobile page.

Beautiful soup

License: Free Site: https://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/ Beautiful Soup is a popular Python language library designed for web scraping. Features list: • Some simple ways to navigate, search and modify the analysis tree • Document encodings are handled automatically • Provide different analysis strategies Highlights: Completely free, highly customizable, and developer-friendly.

dexi.io

License: Commercial, starting at $ 119 a month.

Site: https://dexi.io/

Dexi provides leading web dredging software for enterprises. Their solutions include web scraping, interaction, monitoring, and processing software to provide fast data insights that lead to better decisions and better business performance.

Features list:

• Scraping the web on a large scale Intelligent data mining • Real-time data points

Import.io

License: Commercial starts at $ 299 per month. Site: https://www.import.io/ Import.io provides a comprehensive web data integration solution that makes it fast, easy and affordable to increase the strategic value of your web data. It also has a professional service team who can help clients maximize the solution value. Features list: Pointing and clicking training • Interactive workflow • Scheduled abrasion • Machine learning proposal • Works with login • Generates website screen shots • Notifications upon completion • URL generator Highlights: Point and Click, Machine Learning, URL Builder, Interactive Workflow.

Scrapinghub

License: Commercial version, starting at $299 per month. Website: https://scrapinghub.com/ Scraping hub is the main creator and administrator of Scrapy, which is the most popular web scraping framework written in Python. They can also provide data services on demand in the following situations: product and price information, alternative financial data, competition and market research, sales and market research, news and content monitoring, and retail and distribution monitoring. functions list: • Scrapy Cloud crawling, standardized as Scrapy Cloud •Robot countermeasures and other challenges Focus: Scalable crawling cloud.

Highlights: scalable scraping cloud.

Tweet Showing How Google Itself Is A “Scraper Site” Goes Massively Viral

Perhaps it’s SEO’s “Oreo moment,” a tweet relating to search engine optimization that’s gained nearly as much attention as Oreo’s famous Super Bowl blackout tweet. But the subject was a perfect storm of goodness — a real-life example of Google doing the type of thing in search it seems to be telling others not to do.

Yesterday, the head of Google’s web spam team Matt Cutts announced a new Google Scraper Report for publishers to use if they see a site that has copied or “scraped” its content and which outranks the publisher in Google searches.

That quickly brought up a number of people joking in various places about how Google itself borrows content from other sites to make the direct answers it displays in its own search results. But, no joke hit it as right as that from digital marketer Dan Barker on Twitter, who tweeted back to Cutts:

It was super clever. Barker did a search for what is a scraper site, which brought up Google’s own web definition at the top of the results. And that definition technically outranks the original source of the content, Wikipedia, which comes right below.

Google does link to Wikipedia in its excerpt, which is in keeping with how its other search results work and generally on the right side of the law, when these things have been challenged in various places. And by scraper site, Google’s really talking about sites that wholescale copy all of someone’s content, rather than aiming for a fair use excerpt.

But still, as Google has increased the amount of web definitions, direct answers andKnowledge Graph box answers that are drawn from the content of other sites, the tensions have been rising.

With regular search listings, Google typically showed enough information for a searcher to decide if they want to visit a website and, if so, they’d click through. But the changes over the past few years (which Bing also does) have been to provide actual answers drawn from sites, so that there’s no need to click through.

It’s a difficult balancing act, because there are good reasons why it makes more sense for Google (or Bing) to just show the direct answer of something, rather than having dozens of sites all fight to be number one for “What time is the Super Bowl,” as they do.

But, it’s also a fundamental change to the unwritten contract between search engines and publishers — that yes, search engines can build their “content” on the back of publisher content, but only if there’s a fair exchange of traffic.

Barker’s tweet is perhaps the biggest sign ever that publishers are feeling like the balancing act is tipping too much into Google’s side. I’ve never, in 18 years writing about search, seen such a response like this. Last year’s Oreo tweet, when the Super Bowl had a blackout, was a darling example of huge engagement.

Scraping: When a site copies all of the information from a popular publisher and tries to pass it off as their own, sometimes even outranking the original author. Google has made great strides in preventing scraping, but

it can still be an issue for those caught in its web. Here are some easy ways to discourage and prevent scraping:

Image via Wikipedia