Octoparse
The ability to prospect and clean the big data is essential in the 21 century. Proper tools are a prerequisite to compete with your rivalries and add edges to your business. I make a list of 30 top big data tools for you as a reference.
The ability to prospect and clean the big data is essential in the 21 century. Proper tools are prerequisite to compete with your rivalries and add edges to your business. I make a list of 30 top big data tools for you as reference.
Part 1: Data Extraction Tools
Part 2: Open Source Data tools
Part 3: Data Visualization
Part 4: Sentiment Analysis
Part 5: Open Source Database
Part 1. Data Extraction Tools
1 Octoparse
octoparse
Octoparse is a simple and intuitive web crawler for data extraction from many websites without coding. You can use it both on your Windows devices and Mac OS system. Whether you are a first-time self-starter, experienced expert or business owner, it will satisfy your needs with its enterprise-class service. To eliminate the difficulties of setting up and using, Octoparse adds "Task Templates" covering over 30 websites for starters to grow comfortable with the software. They allow users to capture the data without task configuration. For seasoned pros, "Advanced Mode" helps you extract Enterprise volume data within minutes. Besides, you can set up Scheduled Cloud Extraction which enables you to obtain dynamic data in real-time and keep a tracking record. Start your Free Trial Now!
Content Graber is a web crawling software for advanced extraction. It has a programming operation environment for development, testing, and production servers. You can use C# or VB.NET to debug or write scripts to control the crawler. It also allows you to add third-party extensions on top of your crawler. With comprehensive capabilities, Content Grabber is exceedingly powerful to users with basic tech knowledge.
Import.io is a web-based data extraction tool. It first launched in London. Now, import.io shift its business model from B2C to B2B. In 2019, Import.io purchased Connotate and become a Web Data Integration Platform. With extensive web data service, Import.io is an excellent choice for business analytics.
Parsehub is a web-based crawler. It can extract data handle dynamic websites with AJax, JavaScripts, and behind the login. It has a one-week free-trial window for users to experience its functionalities.
Mozenda is a web scraping software that also provides scraping service for business-level data extraction. It can extract scalable data both from Cloud-hosted and on-premise software.
Part 2. Open Source Data Tools
KNIME Analytics Platform is an analytic platform. It can help you to discover business insights and full potential within the markets. It provides Eclipse Platform along with other external extensions for data mining and machine learning. It gives over 2k modules for analytic professionals ready to deploy.
OpenRefine (formerly Google Refine) is a powerful tool to work with messy data: cleaning, transforming, and dataset linking. With its group features, you can normalize the data at ease.
It’s a free software programming language and software environment for statistical computing and graphics. The R language is popular among data miners for developing statistical software and data analysis. It gains credits and popularities in recent years due to the ease of use and extensive functionalities.
Besides data mining, it also provides statistical and graphical techniques, linear and nonlinear modeling, classical statistical tests, time-series analysis, classification, clustering, and more.
Much like KNIME, RapidMiner operates through visual programming and is capable of manipulating, analyzing, and modeling. It increases data work productivity through an open-source platform, machine learning, and model deployment. The unified data science platform accelerates the analytical workflows from data prep to implementation. It dramatically improves efficiency.
pentaho
It is a great business intelligence software that helps companies to make data-driven decisions. As most companies have difficulties in getting value from the data. The platform integrates data sources, including the local database, Hadoop, and NoSQL. As a result, you can analyze and manage the data at ease.
It is an open-source integration software designed to turn data into insights. It provides various services and software, including cloud storage, enterprise application integration, data management, etc. Backed by a vast community, it allows all Talend users and members to share information, experiences, doubts from any location.
Weka is a collection of machine learning algorithms for data mining tasks. The algorithms can either be applied directly to a data set or called from your own JAVA code. It is also well suited for developing new machine learning schemes. With GUI, it translates the world of Data Science to professionals who are lack proficiencies in programming.
It is an open-source software package for Microsoft Excel. As an add-on extension, it doesn't have data integration services and functionalities. It focuses on social network analysis. The intuitive networks and descriptive relationships make social media analysis at ease. As one of the best statistical tools for data analysis, it includes advanced network metrics, access to social media network data importers, and automation.
Gephi is also an open-source network analysis and visualization software package written in Java on the NetBeans platform. Think of the giant friendship maps you see that represent LinkedIn or Facebook connections. Gephi takes that a step further by providing exact calculations.
Part 3. Data Visualization Tools
Microsoft PowerBI has both on-premise and in-cloud service. It first was introduced as an Excel add-on. Soon later, PowerBI gains its popularity with its powerful functionalities. As of now, it is perceived as a leader in Analytics. It provides data visualization and business intelligence features that allow users to creative innovative reports and dashboards at ease with lower cost.
Solver specializes a Corporate Performance Management (CPM) software. Its software BI360 is available for cloud and on-premise deployment, which focuses on four key analytics areas including financial reporting, budgeting, and dashboards and data warehouse
Qlik is a self-served data analysis and visualization tool. The visualized dashboards, which help the company “understand” business performance at ease.
tableau
Tableau is an interactive data visualization tool. “Unlike” most visualization tools that require scripting. Tableau helps novice “surmount” the difficulties to get hands-on. The drag and drop features make data analysis at ease. They also have a "starter kit" and rich training source to help users to create innovative reports.
Fusion Table is a data management platform provided by Google. You can use it to gather, visualize, and share the data. It is like a spreadsheet, but much more powerful and professional. You can collaborate with colleges by adding your dataset from CSV, KML, and spreadsheets. You also can publish your data work and embed it into other web properties.
Infogram provides over 35 interactive charts and more than 500 maps to help you visualize the data. Along with a variety of charts, including column, bar, pie, or word cloud, it is not hard to impress your audience with innovative infographics.
Part 4. Sentiment Tools
It has a customer feedback tool that collects customers' feedbacks and reviews. Then they analyze the languages using NLP to clarify the positive and negative intentions. It visualizes the results with graphs and charts on the dashboards. Besides, you can connect HubSpot's ServiceHub to the CRM system. As a result, you can relate the survey results with a specific contact. As such, you can identify unhappy customers and provide quality service in time to increase customer retention.
Semantria is a tool that can collect posts, tweets, and comments from social media channels. It uses natural language processing to parse the text and analyzes customers' attitude. This way, companies can gain actionable insights and come up with better ideas to improve your products and service.
Trackur’s social media monitoring tool which can track the mentions from different sources. It scraps tons of webpages, including videos, blogs, forums, and images to search for relevant messages. You can guard your reputation with its sophisticated functionality. Please don't bother to make cold calls or email pitch letters, and you still can listen to the voice of your customers' regards to our brand and products.
SAS
SAS sentiment analysis is a comprehensive software. For most challenging part of web text analysis is misspelling. SAS can proofread and conduct clustering analysis at ease. With its rule-based Natural Language Processing, SAS grades and categories the messages efficiently.
It can analyze comments, posts, forums, news sites, and other over 10M sources across over 50 languages. Besides, it can categorize genders and locations. This allows you to make strategic marketing plans target specific groups. You also can access real-time data and check out the online conversation.
Part 5. Databases
oracle
There is no doubt that Oracle is the champion amongst the open-source database. With numbers of features, it is the best choice for the enterprise. It also supports the integration of different platforms. The ease of set up in AWS makes it a reliable option for the Relational Database. The high security to integrate private data such as credit cards makes it irreplaceable.
2.PostgreSQL
It surpasses Oracle, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server and becomes the fourth most popular database. With its rock-solid stability, it can handle a high load of data.
Airtable
It is a cloud-based database software that has extensive capabilities of a data table for capturing and information display. I also have a spreadsheet and a built-in calendar to track tasks at ease. It easy to get hands-on with its starter templates on lead management, bug tracking, and applicant tracking.
MariaDB
It is a free, open-source database for data storage, insertion, modification, and retrieval. Also, Maria is backed by a strong community with active members to share information and knowledge.
Improvado
imrovado
Improvad is a tool built for marketers to get all their data into one place, in real-time, with automated dashboards and reports. You can choose to view your data inside the Improvado dashboard or pipe it into a data warehouse or visualization tool of your choice like Tableau, Looker, Excel, etc. Brands, agencies, and universities all love using Improvado because it saves them thousands of hours of manual reporting time and millions of dollars in marketing.
https://www.octoparse.com/blog/top-30-big-data-tools-for-data-analysis
https://www.octoparse.com/blog/why-content-aggregation-tools-are-important-to-every-website
On average, Google processes over 40,000 search queries per second. High ranking content is a powerful engine of attracting traffic, increasing retention rate and conversion for a website. However for most websites, it is not an easy task to produce high-quality content regularly due to different kinds of limits.
Why Content Aggregation Tools Important
This is why content aggregation tools have become very important to every website these days. With a content aggreation tool, you can gather a lot of content in one day without putting too much manpower on it.
If you haven’t used any content aggregation tool or do not know the benefits of it, think about these questions:
Without high-quality updates, how can people find your website using Google? If you’re not sharing new or trending content on your website or social media, why will people follow your page? If you’re not providing useful content to help your target audience to solve their problem, why will they buy from you?
The difference between content aggregation and content plagiarism
A lot of people may think that using content aggregation tools to gather content for their websites is a kind of content plagiarism. While, don’t rush a conclusion. Content aggregation is a process of compiling information on any topic for one or more related keywords and publishing them on your websites, platforms, social media pages or blogs. While content plagiarism is an act of taking someone’s work, claiming it to be yours.
Publishing the content (citing the source when necessary) you gather with a content aggregation tool won’t take away the credits of the original writers. Click this content aggregation site to test away. You’ll know how content aggregation can benefit both the platform users and original writers. The concept behind content aggregation is to provide users with rich information that would have been hard to find.
What is a content aggregation tool?
A content aggregation tool is an application or website that can help you collect content from a wide range of platforms and then republish all the content into one place. There are many types of content aggregation tools specializing in collecting different kinds of content(sports news, finance news, and game news, etc.) or content formats (video, blogs, podcasts, pictures, and so on.).
It is obvious that you can’t use one content aggregation tool to fit all your content needs. Selecting your content aggregation toolkit depends on which sources you plan to pull content from and whether the tool supports those platforms. We will cover more information on different types of aggregators and content sources in the upcoming session.
Content Sources and Content Aggregation Tools
There are many sources of high-quality content and content aggregation tools in the market to help you with content curation and aggregation on your website. We’ve picked five top-rated recommendations for your aggregation project.
#1. Octoparse
Octoparse is a unique type of content aggregation tool. It’s a free web crawler. Instead of providing content, it helps people who have a need for massive content sources to collect content from any websites.
You can use it to scrape a great deal of content from Reddit, Medium, The New Yorker, just to name a few. Then you can upload the scraped content to your CMS as your content repository for use when you need new content. Besides, it can also help you gather information from social media to help you monitor trending topics and people’s interests.
#2. Google News
Google News is one of the easiest sources to set up as a content aggregation tool to collect feed around a specific topic. It “presents a continuous, customizable flow of articles organized from thousands of publishers and magazines.” To use Google News as your content aggregation tool, you need an API to connect your CMS to Google News.
#3. Netvibes
Netvibes is a dashboard of everything, delivering social media and brand monitoring, news aggregation, drag-and-drop analytics and data visualization—all in one easy-to-use and fully customizable platform. Netvibes’ personalized dashboards enable users to listen, learn and act on everything that matters to them online.
#4. Digg
Digg is a social network and news aggregating site, aiming to select stories specifically for the Internet audience such as science, trending political issues, and viral Internet issues. This website is great for content inspiration.
If you can’t find anything interesting to write, take a moment to read some of its articles. It will inspire you. It doesn’t support API connection at the moment. If you want content from them, you need to take some time to contact time for content citing permission.
#5. Castbox
Castbox is a rich podcast database and is also a great source for content aggregation you can’t miss. It offers access to over 95 million audio content including podcasts, audiobooks, FM radio and more in 27 different countries on your devices.
You can use it to discover popular podcasts on various topics including News, Music, Business, Games, etc. If you’re searching for podcast sources for your target audience, Castbox is definitely a good choice.
Conclusion
To evaluate a content aggregation tool is to see whether it can gather information you need intelligently and effortlessly. You may already have your own sources to get the wanted content or you may try above. The key is to choose a right content aggregation tool and Octoparse, specialized in web scraping, could be the surprise for you.
https://www.octoparse.com/blog/how-to-get-qualified-leads-with-web-scraping
Technology is changing the business world's face and making critical marketing tactics and business information easily accessible. One such tactic that has been making the rounds for quality lead generation is web scraping.
Web scraping is nothing but collecting valuable information from web pages and putting all of them together for future use. If you have ever copied word content from a website and later used it for your purpose, you, too, have used the process of web scraping, although for a minuscule level. This article speaks in detail about the process of web scraping and its impact on the generation of high-value qualifying leads.
Table of Contents
Basics of Web Scraping
Processes of Web Scraping
Industries Benefited by Web Scraping
2. How to Generate Leads with Web Scraping
Other benefits of Web Scraping
Conclusions
Introduction to Web Scraping
Basics of Web Scraping
web scraping basic
The basic flow of Web Scraping Processes
What is it?
Web scraping, also known as Web Harvesting and Web Data Extraction, is the process of extracting or copying specific data or valuable information from websites and depositing it into a central database or spreadsheet for research, analysis, or a lead generation later on. While web scraping can be done manually as well, businesses are increasingly using bots or web crawlers to implement an automated process.
#Tip: Yellow Pages is one of the largest business directories on the web, especially in the USA. It is the best destination for contact scrapings like names, addresses, phone numbers, and emails for lead generation.
Processes of Web Scraping
Web Scraping is an extremely simple process and involves just two components- a web crawler and a web scraper. And thanks to the technology ninja, these are done by AI bots with minimum to no manual intervention. While the crawler, usually called a “spider,” browses multiple web pages to index and search for content by following links, the scraper quickly extracts the exact information.
The process starts when the crawler accesses the World Wide Web directly through a browser and fetches the pages by downloading them. The second process includes extraction where the web scraper copies the data into a spreadsheet and formats it into unable segments for further processing.
The design and usage of the web scrapers vary widely, depending on the project and its purpose.
Industries Benefited by Web Scraping
HR Recruitment
E-commerce
Retail Industry
Entertainment
Beauty and Lifestyle
Real Estate
Data Science
Finance
Fashion retailers inform designers about upcoming trends based on scraped insights, investors time their stock positions, and marketing teams overwhelm the competition with in-depth insights. A pervasive example of web scraping is to extract names, phone numbers, locations, and email IDs from job posting sites by HR Recruiters.
#Tip: Post-COVID 19, data generation in the healthcare sector has multiplied exponentially, owing to which web scraping in the healthcare and related pharmaceutical industries has increased by 57%. Companies are analyzing data to design new policies, develop vaccines, offer better public health solutions, etc. to transform business opportunities.
Web Scraping and Lead Generation
lead generation
Benefits of Web Scraping for lead generation
#Fact: 79% of marketers see web scraping as a very beneficial source of lead generation.
Data analysts and business experts unanimously agree on the fact that utilizing Web Scraping by applying residential proxies (residential proxies allow you to choose a specific location and surf the web as a real-user in that area) is one of the most beneficial ways to generate sales qualified leads for your business. Designing a unique lead scraper to generate leads can be a lot more cost and time-efficient to quickly generate quality leads.
Web scraping plays a significant role in lead generation by two steps:
Identify sources
The first step for every business in the lead generation is to streamline the process. What sources are you going to use? Who is your target audience? What geographical location are you going to target? What is your marketing budget? What are the goals of your brand? What image do you want to establish through your brand? What type of marketing do you want to follow? Who are your competitors?
Decoding the answer to such pivotal questions and designing a scraper bot specifically to meet your requirements will lead you to extract and access high-quality relative information.
Tip: If your competitors' customer information is publicly available, you could scrape their websites for their demographics. This would give you a good visualization of who your potential customers are and what they are currently offering.
Extract data
After figuring out the pivotal questions to run a successful business, your next step is to extract the most relevant, real-time, actionable, and high-yielding data to design strategic marketing campaigns for maximum benefit. However, there are two possible ways to do it-
A) Opting for a lead generation tool
One of the most common B2B data providers, DataCaptive, offers lead generation service and other marketing solutions to provide unparalleled support to your business and boost ROI by 4X.
B) Using scraping tools
Octoparse is one of the most prominent scrapping tool providers that provides you with valuable information to maximize the lead generation process. Our flexibility and scalability of web scraping ensure to meet your project parameters with ease.
Our three-step process of web scraping includes-
In the first step, we customize scrapers that are unique and compliment your project's requirement to target and extract exact data that will give the most beneficial results. You can also enlist the website or web pages that you specifically want to scrape.
The scrapers retrieve the data in HTML format. We then eliminate the nice surrounding the data and parse it to extract the data that you want. The data can either be simple or complex, depending upon the project and its demand.
In the third and final process, the data is formatted as per the exact demand of the project and stored accordingly.
Other benefits of Web Scraping
Price Comparison
Having access to the fresh and real-time price of related services offered by your competitors can revolutionize your day to day business proceedings and increase your brand’s visibility. Web scraping is the one-step solution for determining automatic pricing solutions and analyzing profitable insights.
Analyze sentiment/Buyer-psychology
Sentiment analysis or buyer-persona helps brands understand their clientele by analyzing their purchase behavior, browsing history, and online engagement. Web scraped data plays a vital role in eradicating biased interpretations by collecting and analyzing relevant and insightful buyer data.
Marketing- Content, Social Media, and other Digital Mediums
Web scraping is the ultimate solution for monitoring, aggregating, and parsing the most critical stories from your industry and generating content around it for most impactful responses.
Business Investment
Web data explicitly tailored for investors to estimate company and government fundamentals and analyze insights from SEC filings and understand the market scenarios to make sound investing decisions.
Market research
Web scraping is making the process of market research and business intelligence even more critical across the globe by delivering high quality, high volume, and highly insightful data of every shape and size.
Conclusions
Web scraping is the process of screening web pages for relevant content and downloading them into a spreadsheet for further use with a web crawler and a web scraper.
The most prominent industries to practice web scraping for lead generating and boosting sales are data science, real estate, digital marketing, entertainment, education, retail, HR Recruitment, and Beauty and Lifestyle, amongst many others.
After the COVD 19 pandemic, the healthcare and pharmaceutical industry has witnessed a significant rise in its web scraping percentage due to its continuous and exponential rise in data generation.
Apart from lead generation, web scraping is also beneficial for market research, content creation, investment planning, competitor analysis, etc.
Some of the best and most used web scraping tools or tool providers are Octoparse, ScraperAPI, ScrapeSimple, Parsehub, Scrappy, Diffbot, and Cheerio.
When looking for a web scraping solution, Mac users may run into a situation where an excellent web scraper only supports Windows or Linux systems, but it cannot be installed on Mac OS.
Table of Contents
Web scraping on mac for FREE
Where can you scrape from with a good Mac web scraper
How to scrape target web pages on your apple device
Closing thoughts
Web scraping on mac for FREE
This would no longer be a problem as Octoparse launched its industry-leading web scraping software for mac. With its fast extraction speed, robust compatibility, smooth workflow and refreshing design, it stands out as a perfect and free web scraping solution on apple devices.
Click here to learn about Octoparse 8 Mac version
Where can you scrape from with a good Mac web scraper?
A good Mac web scraper, needless to say, allows you to pull data from any website easily without coding on your side. Octoparse makes web scraping on Mac easier than ever. They provide hundreds of ready-to-use web scraping templates, which allows you to
1 Scrape e-commerce & retail platforms including Amazon, eBay, BestBuy, Walmart ...
2 Scrape social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube ...
3 Scrape directories like Yellowpages, Yelp, Crunchbase…
4 Scrape online travel agency sites such as Booking, TripAdvisor, Airbnb…
5 Scrape real estate listings from Kijiji, Gumtree…
With these prebuilt crawlers, you can extract data from other big sites, such as Google Maps, Google Search, Google Play, Yahoo Finance and Indeed within clicks.
How to scrape target web pages on your apple device
No matter where you want to scrape, here is a more flexible solution that would serve you well - the “Advanced Mode” in Octoparse. You can build a customized crawler from scratch under this mode.
It is very easy to create a crawler to pull data off any websites. There is zero learning curve even for a layman. Octoparse auto-detects all the data fields on the webpage, generates a crawler within minutes and extracts the data within seconds. Below is a screenshot of the data I got using the auto-detection feature:
Scraped data in excel
Data Extracted in Excel
Take Yelp as an example. Let’s say you are trying to scrape all the general information about Auto repair shops in Houston, TX. This is the website URL you’d like to extract: https://www.yelp.com/search?find_desc=Auto+Repair&find_loc=Houston%2C+TX%2C+United+States&ns=1
Octoparse 8.1 for Mac
Step 1: Input the target URL to start detecting the webpage
First, you need to install Octoparse on your Mac device. If you have experienced the Windows version before, you will notice the Mac version applies a similar design.
Paste the URL above into Octoparse to let it auto-detect the page. As you scroll down the page inside the built-in browser, you will notice that the listing data, as well as the “Next page” button, are highlighted in red. This means that Octoparse is going to extract all the highlighted data on all pages.
Enter the URL
Step 2: Save the detection settings to build a crawler
The second step is very simple. Click “save settings” and Octoparse will build a scraping workflow on your left-hand side. You can easily preview all the data that is going to be extracted on the “data preview” section.
Build your crawler
Step 3: Run the crawler
Now you are just one step away from your data: save the crawler and run it. As you can see, within seconds, your target data is extracted from the webpage. When the extraction is completed, you can export the collected data into formats of your choice, including Excel sheets, CSV, HTML, SqlServer, MySql, etc. You can also stream live data into your database with Octoparse APIs.
Export the data
Closing thoughts
This is a three-step demo of extracting data with Octoparse for mac users. If you are concerned about processing speed, as a Mac web scraper with rich features, Octoparse also provides a Cloud platform for you to run your scraping projects in the cloud 24/7 even with your laptop off.
If you are intested in quick and easy web scraping, check out the video to know more about how to scrape data from any website with Octoparse auto-detection algorithm.
https://www.octoparse.com/blog/octoparse-system-maintenance
Web data extraction is gaining popularity as one of the great ways to collect useful data to fuel the business cost-effectively. Although web data extraction has existed for quite some time, it has never been as heavily used, or as reliable as it is today. This guide aims to help web scraping beginners to get a general idea of web data extraction.
Table of Contents
What is web data extraction
Benefits of web data extraction
How does web data extraction work
Web data extraction for non-programmers
Legal aspects of web data extraction
Conclusions
What is web data extraction
Web data extraction is a practice of massive data copying done by bots. It has many names, depending on how people would like to call it, web scraping, data scraping, web crawling, to name a few. The data extracted(copied) from the internet can be saved to a file in your computer, or database.
Benefits of web data extraction
Businesses can get a load of benefits from web data extraction. It can be used more widely than you expect, but it would suffice to point out how it is used in a few areas.
1 E-commerce price monitoring
The importance of price monitoring speaks for itself, especially when you sell items on an online marketplace such as Amazon, eBay, Lazada, etc. These platforms are transparent, that is, buyers, also any one of your competitors, have easy access to prices, inventory, reviews and all kinds of information for each store. which means you can’t just focus on the price but also need to keep an eye on other aspects of your competitors. Hence in addition to prices, there are more available for you to dig into. Price monitoring may be more than prices.
Most retailers and e-commerce vendors try to put as much information about their products online as possible. This is helpful for buyers to evaluate, but also is too much exposure for the store owners because with such information, competitors can get a glimpse of how you run your business. Fortunately, you can use these data to do the same thing.
You should gather information such as price, inventory levels, discounts, product turnover, new items added, new locations added, product category ASP, etc, from your competitors as well. With these data at hand, you can fuel your business with below benefits rendered by web data extraction.
Increase margins and sales by adjusting prices at the right time on the right channels.
Maintain or improve your competitiveness in the marketplace.
Improve your cost management by using competitor prices as a negotiating ground with suppliers, or review your own overheads and production cost.
Come up with effective pricing strategies, especially during promotion such as season-end sales or holiday seasons.
2 Marketing Analysis
Almost everyone can start their own business as long as they go online thanks to the easy entry brought by the magic Internet. Businesses increasingly sprout on the Internet signifies that competition among retailers will be more fierce. To make your business stand out and to maintain sustainable growth, you can do more than just lower your price or launch advertising campaigns. They could be productive for a business in an initial stage, while in the long run, you should keep an eye on what other players are doing and condition your strategies to the ever-changing environment.
You can study your customers and your competitors by scraping product prices, customer behaviors, product reviews, events, stock levels, and demands, etc. With this information, you’ll gain insights on how to improve your service and products and how to stand out among your competitors. Web data extraction tools can streamline this process, providing you with always up-to-date information for marketing analysis.
Get a better understanding of your customers’ demands and behaviors, and then find some specific customers’ needs to make exclusive offerings.
Analyze customer reviews and feedback for products and services of your competitors to make improvements to your own product.
Make a predictive analysis to help foresee future trends, plan future strategies and timely optimize your prioritization.
Study your competitors’ copiesand product images to find out the most suitable ways to differentiate yourself.
3 Lead generation
There is no doubt that being capable of generating more leads is one of the significant skills to grow your business. How to generate leads effectively? A lot of people talk about it but few of them know how to make it. Most salespeople, however, are still looking for leads on the Internet in a traditional, manual way. What a typical example of wasting time on trivia.
Nowadays, smart salespeople will search for leads with the help of web scraping tools, running through social media, online directories, websites, forums, etc, so as to save more time to work on their promising clients. Just leave this meaningless and boring lead copying work to your crawlers.
When you use a web crawler, don’t forget to collect the information below for lead analysis. After all, not every lead is worth spending time on. You need to prioritize the prospects who are ready or willing to buy from you.
Personal information: Name, age, education, phone number, job position, email
Company information: Industry, size, website, location, profitability
As time passes by, you’ll collect a lot of leads, even enough to build your own CRM. Having a database of email addresses of your target audience, you can send out information, newsletters, invitations for an event or advertisement campaigns in bulk. But beware of being too spammy!
How does web data extraction work?
After knowing what you can benefit from a web data extraction tool, you may want to build one on your own to harvest the fruits of this technique. It’s important to first understand how a crawler works and what web pages are built on before starting your journey of web data extraction.
Build a crawler with programming languages and then enter the URL of a website that you want to scrape from. It sends an HTTP request to the URL of the webpage. If the site grants you access, it responds to your request by returning the content of webpages.
Parse the webpage is only half of the web scraping. The scraper inspects the page and interprets a tree structure of the HTML. The tree structure works as a navigator will help the crawler follow the paths through the web structure to get the data.
After that, the web data extraction tool extracts the data fields you require to scrape and store it. Lastly, when the extraction is finished, choose a format and export the data scraped.
The process of web scraping is easy to understand, but it’s definitely not easy to build one from scratch for non-technical people. Luckily, there are many free web data extraction tools out there thanks to the development of big data. Stay tuned, there are some nice and free scrapers I would love to recommend to you.
Web data extraction for non-programmers
Here are 5 popular web data extraction tools rated by many non-technical users. If you’re new to the web data extraction, you should give it a try.
Octoparse
Octoparse is a powerful website data extraction tool Its user-friendly point-and-click interface can guide you through the entire extraction process effortlessly. What's more, the auto-detection process and ready-to-use templates make scraping much easier for new starters.
Cyotek WebCopy
It is self-evident that WebCopy serves as a data extraction tool for websites. It is a free tool for copying full or partial websites locally onto your hard disk for offline reach. WebCopy will scan the specified website and download its content onto your hard disk. Links to resources such as style-sheets, images, and other pages on the website will automatically be remapped to match the local path. Using its extensive configuration you can define which parts of a website will be copied and how.
Getleft
Getleft is a Web-site data extraction tool. You can give it a URL, it will download a complete site according to the options specified by the user. It also changes the original pages and all the links to relative links so you can surf on your hard disk.
OutWit Hub
OutWit Hub is a Web data extraction software application designed to automatically extract information from online or local resources. It recognizes and grabs links, images, documents, contacts, recurring vocabulary and phrases, RSS feeds and converts structured and unstructured data into formatted tables which can be exported to spreadsheets or databases.
WebHarvy
WebHarvy is a point-and-click web data extraction software. It helps users easily extract data from websites to their computers. No programming/scripting knowledge is required.
Legal aspects of web data extraction
Is it legal to use a web data extraction tool? The answer depends on how you plan to use the data and whether you follow the terms of use of the website. In other words, use it within the laws.
There are a few common examples of legal and illegal activities using web scraping tools.
Things you’re allowed to do:
Use automated tools like web data extraction tools.
Get access to websites like social media, e-commerce platforms, and directories to gather information.
Re-publish gathered public information.
Things you’re not allowed to do:
Induce harm to third-party web users (eg. posting spam comments)
Induce harm to a target site functionality (eg. throttle bandwidth)
Criminal activity (eg. reselling or republishing proprietary information property)
Tortious conduct (eg. using that extracted info in a misleading or harmful way)
In addition, users of web data extraction tools or techniques mustn’t violate the terms of use, laws of regulations, and the copyright statements of the websites. The website will state clearly what kind of data can be used and how you can access it. You can find this information easily on its home page.
Conclusion
By now, you’ve known how powerful web data extraction can be, how it works and where you can find web data extraction tools for non-programmers. The next thing you should do is to download a tool or write a crawler to start your web crawling journey.
Regardless of what tools or techniques you are going to use to extract web data, they serve to the same end: Get helpful data to fuel your business.
https://www.octoparse.com/blog/web-data-extraction-2020
https://www.octoparse.com/blog/scrape-financial-data-without-python
Financial market is a place of risks and instability. It’s hard to predict how the curve will go and sometimes, for investors, one decision could be a make-or-break move. That’s why experienced practitioners never lose track of the financial data.
We human beings are wired to see in short term. Unless we have a database with data in well structure, we are not able to get a handle on voluminous information. Data scraping is the solution that gets complete data at your fingertip.
Table of Contents
What We Are Scraping When We Scrape Financial Data?
Why Scrape Financial Data?
How to Scrape Financial Data without Python
Let’s get started!
What We Are Scraping When We Scrape Financial Data?
When it comes to scraping financial data, stock market data is in the spotlight of attention. But there’s more, trading prices and changes of securities, mutual funds, futures, cryptocurrencies, etc. Financial statements, press releases and other business-related news are also sources of financial data that people will scrape.
Why Scrape Financial Data?
Financial data, when extracted and analyzed in real time, can provide wealthy information for investments and trading. And people in different positions scrape financial data for varied purposes.
Stock market prediction
Stock trading organizations leverage data from online trading portals like Yahoo Finance to keep records of stock prices. This financial data help companies to predict the market trends and buy/sell stocks for the highest profits. Same for trades in futures, currencies and other financial products. With complete data at hand, cross-comparison becomes easier and a bigger picture manifests.
Equity research
“Don’t put all the eggs in one basket.” Portfolio managers do equity research to predict the performance of multiple stocks. Data is used to identify the pattern of their changes and further develop an algorithmic trading model. Before getting to this end, a vast amount of financial data will involve in the quantitative analysis.
Sentiment analysis of financial market
Scraping financial data is not merely about numbers. Things can go qualitatively. We may find that the presupposition raised by Adam Smith is untenable - people are not always economic, or say, rational. Behavioral economics reveals that our decisions are susceptible to all kinds of cognitive biases, plainly, emotions.
Using the data from financial news, blogs, relevant social media posts and reviews, financial organizations can perform sentiment analysis to grab people’s attitude towards the market, which can be an indicator of the market trend.
How to Scrape Financial Data without Python
If you are a non-coder, stay tuned, let me explain how you can scrape financial data with the help of Octoparse. Yahoo Finance is a nice source to get comprehensive and real-time financial data. I will show you below how to scrape from the site.
Besides, there are lots of financial data sources with up-to-date and valuable information you can scrape from, such as Google Finance, Bloomberg, CNNMoney, Morningstar, TMXMoney, etc. All these sites are HTML codes in nature, which means that all the tables, news articles, and other texts/URLs can be extracted in bulk by a web scraping tool.
To know more about what web scraping is and what it is used for, you can check out this article.
Let’s get started!
There are 3 ways to get the data:
template Use a web scraping template
crawler Build your web crawlers
service Turn to data scraping services
open the yahoo template
The Yahoo Finance template offered by Octoparse is designed to scrape the Cryptocurrency data. No more configuration is required. Simply click “try it” and you will get the table data in minutes.
run and get the financial data
Step 1: Enter the web address to build a crawler
The bot will load the website in the built-in browser, and one click on the Tips Panel can trigger the auto-detection process and get the table data fields done.
Build a crawler
Step 2: Execute the crawler to get data
When your desired data are all highlighted in red, save the settings and run the crawler. As you can see in the pop-up, all the data are scraped down successfully. Now, you can export the data into Excel, JSON, CSV, or to your database via APIs.
Execute the task and export data
Why data scraping services deserve?
Time and energy-saving
The only thing you would bother is to convey clearly to the data service provider what data you want. Once this is done, the data service team will deal with the rest of all, no hassle. You can plunge into your core business and do what you good at. Let professionals get the scraping job done for you.
Zero learning curve & tech issues
Even the easiest scraping tool takes time to master. The ever-changing environment in different websites may be hard to deal with. And when you are scraping on a large scale, you may encounter issues such as IP ban, low speed, duplicate data, etc. Data scraping service can free you from these troubles.
No legal violations
If you are not paying enough attentions to the terms of service of the data sources you are scraping from, you may get yourself into trouble. With the support of experienced legal counsel, a professional web scraping service provider works in accordance with laws and the whole scraping process will be implemented in a legitimate manner.
Web scraping surely brings advantages to us. It is speedy, cost-effective, and can collect data from websites with an accuracy of over 90%. It frees you from endless copy-and-paste into messy layout documents. However, something may be overlooked. There are some limitations and even risks lurking behind web scraping.
Click to read:
What is web scraping and what is it used for?
Which is the best way to scrape web data?
What are the limitations of web scraping tools?
Closing thoughts
· What is web scraping and what is it used for?
For those who are not familiar with web scraping, let me explain. Web scraping is a technique used to extract information from websites at a rapid speed. The data scraped down and saved to the local will be accessible anytime. It works as one of the first steps in data analysis, data visualization and data mining as it collects data from many sources. Getting data prepared is the prerequisite for further visualization or analysis. That’s obvious. How can we start web scraping?
· Which is the best way to scrape web data?
There are some common techniques to scrape data from web pages, which all come with some limitations. You can either build your own crawler using programming languages, outsource your web scraping projects, or use a web scraping tool. Without a specific context, there is no such thing as “the best way to scrape”. Think of your basic knowledge of coding, how much time is disposable and your financial budget, you will have your own pick.
For example, if you are an experienced coder and you are confident with your coding skills, you can definitely scrape data by yourself. But since each website needs a crawler, you will have to build a bunch of crawlers for different sites. This can be time-consuming. And you should be equipped with sufficient programming knowledge for crawlers’ maintenance. Think about that.
If you own a company with a big budget craving for accurate data, the story would be different. Forget about programming, just hire a group of engineers or outsource your project to professionals.
Speaking of outsourcing, you may find some online freelancers offering these data collection services. The unit price looks quite affordable. However, if you calculate carefully with the number of sites and loads of items you are planning to get, the amount may grow exponentially. Statistics shows that to scrape 6000 products’ information from Amazon, the quotes from web scraping companies average around $250 for the initial setup and $177 for monthly maintenance.
If you are a small business owner, or simply a non-coder in need of data, the best choice is to choose a proper scraping tool that suits your needs. As a quick reference, you can check out this list of the top 30 web scraping software.
Limitations of web scraping
· What are the limitations of web scraping tools?
1. Learning curve
Even the easiest scraping tool takes time to master. Some tools, like Apify, still require coding knowledge to use. Some non-coder friendly tools may take people weeks to learn. To scrape websites successfully, knowledge about XPath, HTML, AJAX is necessary. So far, the easiest way to scrape websites is to use prebuilt web scraping templates to extract data within clicks.
The structure of websites change frequently
Scraped data is arranged according to the structure of the website. Sometimes you revisit a site and will find the layout changed. Some designers constantly update the websites for better UI, some may for the sake of anti-scraping. The change could be as small as a position change of a button, or a drastic change of overall page layout. Even a minor change can mess up your data. As the scrapers are built according to the old site, you have to adjust your crawlers every few weeks to get correct data.
It is not easy to handle complex websites
Here comes another tricky technical challenge. If you look at web scraping in general, 50% of websites are easy to scrape, 30% are moderate, and the last 20% are rather tough to scrape from. Some scraping tools are designed to pull data from simple websites that apply numbered navigation. Yet nowadays, more websites are starting to include dynamic elements such as AJAX. Big sites like Twitter apply infinite scrolling, and some websites need users to click on the “load more” button to keep loading the content. In this case, users require a more functional scraping tool.
To extract data on a large scale is way harder
Some tools are not able to extract millions of records, as they can only handle a small-scale scraping. This gives headaches to eCommerce business owners who need millions of lines of regular data feeds straight into their database. Cloud-based scrapers like Octoparse and Web Scraper perform well in terms of large scale data extraction. Tasks run on multiple cloud servers. You get rapid speed and gigantic space for data retention.
A web scraping tool is not omnipotent
What kinds of data can be extracted? Mainly texts and URLs.
Advanced tools can extract texts from source code (inner & outer HTML) and use regular expressions to reformat it. For images, one can only scrape their URLs and convert the URLs into images later. If you are curious about how to scrape image URLs and bulk download them, you can have a look at How to Build an Image Crawler Without Coding.
What’s more, it is important to note that most web scrapers are not able to crawl PDFs, as they parse through HTML elements to extract the data. To scrape data from PDFs, you need other tools like Smallpdf and PDFelements.
Captcha annoys. Does it ever happen to you that you need to get past a captcha when scraping from a website? Be careful, that could be a sign of IP detection. Scraping a website extensively brings heavy traffic, which may overload a web server and cause economic loss to the site owner. To prevent getting blocked, there are many tricks. For example, you can set up your tool to simulate the normal browsing behavior of a human.
Is web scraping legal? A simple “yes” or “no”may not cover the whole issue. Let’s just say… it depends. If you are scraping public data for academic uses, you should be fine. But if you scrape private information from sites clearly stating any automated scraping is disallowed, you may get yourself into trouble. LinkedIn and Facebook are among those who clearly state that “we don’t welcome scrapers here” in their robots.txt file/terms and service (ToS). Mind your acts while scraping.
· Closing thoughts
In a nutshell, there are many limitations in web scraping. If you want data from websites tricky to scrape from, such as Amazon, Facebook, and Instagram, you may turn to a Data-as-a-Service company like Octoparse. This is by far the most convenient method to extract websites that apply strong anti-scraping techniques. A DaaS provider offers customized service according to your needs. By getting your data ready, it relieves you from the stress of building and maintaining your crawlers. No matter which industry you are in, eCommerce, social media, journalism, finance, or consulting, if you are in need of data, feel free to contact us, anytime.
https://www.octoparse.com/blog/web-scraping-limitations
News and information is overwhelming on the Internet. Just think of how many news feeds are updated in merely one second. What’s more, all those news are scattered across different websites and platforms. Owing to the time limitation, searching and visiting all those news that you’re interested in could be an unrealistic task.
So, what are the solutions for people to gather all the news together without repetitive and tedious browsing drudgery:
| Using a News Aggregator Application. (Learn more)
| Customizing your News Aggregator with a web scraping tool (like Octoparse).
If you want to simply browse the information, then using a News Aggregator Application is the easiest and most convenient way. However, if you want to achieve the business value of news accessible on the Internet, then a customized News Aggregator would be the best choice.
This article will dive deeply into News Aggregation, introducing its business value and how to build your own News Aggregator with Octoparse.
Part 1：What is News Aggregation?
Part 2：How does web scraping contribute to News Aggregation？
Part 3：How to create a web scraper to aggregate Financial news？
Part 1：What is News Aggregation?
News Aggregation is a process that helps people to access the assembled news from a variety of sources in one place. Generally speaking, people may be more familiar with some other terms, like news aggregator, news reader, feed readers, RSS reader and so on. Anyway, they all work under the same principle, scraping/extracting/gathering the news and storing/placing them in a handy location, either on your own computer or in the cloud.
Further, we can easily extend News Aggregation to all kinds of Content Aggregation. With a set of content aggregators, we could access our needed information and data anytime we want.
Here are 3 examples listed in the below table:
Type of Aggregation
Purpose
User scenario
Blog Aggregation
Collect the blog information, like the title, author bio, brief introduction of the blog, URL, etc.
Provided that you need to prepare the latest blogs to your audiences who subscribe to your RSS, then a blog aggregator could help you gather the information effectively.
Social Media info Aggregation
Collect the data you want from ALL social media platforms.
For digital marketers, it's important to know the audiences’ attitudes and this info can shed light on marketing strategy and product improvement.
Ecommerce-info Aggregation
Collect the product information across various platforms, like Amazon and Best Buy.
If you’re running an online business, Ecommerce-info Aggregation could help you with price monitoring, competitor monitoring, etc.
Part 2：How does web scraping contribute to News Aggregation？
Web scraping is a technique for website data extraction. We can either create a web scraper with tools (like Octoparse), or build it from scratch by computer languages such as Python, R, and JavaScript. That said, web scraping is the core of the News Aggregation.
Ø Collect news information effectively
Ø Export the scraped data to Excel or via API directly
Ø Update to the latest news at a certain frequency
Part 3：How to create a web scraper to aggregate Financial news？
With Octoparse, everyone can create a web scraper to scrape the news sites easily without coding. As long as you finish reading the short guide below, you can do it too!
I’d love to take Yahoo sport as an example to show you how to create a sports news aggregator.
Yahoo sports
Prerequisites：
l Download Octoparse on your computer.
l Go through Octoparse Scraping 101 to get familiar with how it works.
Let’s get started!
1) Start a task
Open Octoparse on your computer. Enter the URL to the box and click “Start”.
Entering a website and click "Start"
As you click “start”, the built-in browser will pop up in a second. Just wait a moment for the web to load. In the meantime, you can find the Tips Panel below in the corner.
Start auto-detection
Click the “Auto-detect web page data” option and Octoparse will help you auto-detect the data available on the present page.
Auto-detection loading
2) Go with auto-detection
After finishing the auto-detection process, Octoparse will tell you what data it has detected(selected in red). If that's what you need, simply click “Create workflow” on the Tips Panel.
If that’s not what you need, you can choose “switch auto-detect results” to scrape other sets of information.
Create workflow or switch results
3) Run the task
Now, you can see the workflow has been created automatically with only a few clicks. You can check the settings and do some minor revisions(if necessary) on the workflow bar according to your needs.
However, in most cases, you can simple click “Run the task” to get the data directly.
Click run to run the task
4) Options of running
There are three options in Octoparse to run the task.
Because of the nature of news, most likely you would love to gather the updated news at intervals of a certain span of time. When you run the task, you could choose “Schedule task” to set the starting time and the frequency of updating the data as you need.
Run task options Schedule settings
Through the above steps, you just build your own sports news aggregator in Octoparse!
If you have any problem with creating a news aggregator, please feel free to contact us at support@octoparse.com.
Nowadays, the capacity to seize the value of data is more and more important for career development. Building your own web scraper, you can get customized information as you need. Furthermore, news aggregation with Octoparse gives you a head start as it always keeps abreast of the latest news.
Try Octoparse for FREE to start your News aggregation project!
https://www.octoparse.com/blog/news-aggregator-with-web-scraping
Data visualization helps present your data or information in new ways, making data easier to understand, which can contribute to the understanding of information and the efficiency of making business decisions.
A lot of data visualization tools are available just a few clicks on Google, but the problem is how to choose the one that is most suitable for you. In 2020, we’d better know the following 10 best tools which provide better functions in accessing and presenting data.
1.Visme
visme
Visme is an all-in-one content creation tool that allows you to create dynamic and interactive charts, graphs, and other data visualizations for your audience. From pie charts, bar charts to maps and more, Visme allows you to input your data directly into its graph engine, or import existing Excel and Google spreadsheets into it.
Furthermore, you can create live data visualizations by connecting a publicly published Google Sheet to your chart so that each time you update your spreadsheet, your data visualization follows up instantly.
Users of Visme have access to over 30 different types of charts, graphs, and other data tools, which give them tons of options for visualizing numbers, stats, and figures.
You can get started with a free account with Visme, or upgrade to premium plans starting at $14/month, paid annually.
Visme’s data visualization tools are perfect for use in giving lectures, compiling reports, building a dynamic analytics dashboard, or delivering a presentation to your team.
2.Datawrapper
datawrapper
Datawrapper is a web-based tool to create charts, maps, and tables that you can embed online or export as PNG, PDF, or SVG. It’s used by thousands of people every day working for brands like The New York Times, Quartz, Fortune Magazine, Süddeutsche Zeitung, or SPIEGEL ONLINE.
The two big advantages of Datawrapper are the concise interface and the great on-brand design of the visualizations. Let’s look at both:
Datawrapper is easy to use even if you’ve never created a chart or map before. As a web tool, Datawrapper requires no installation. You don’t need to be a coder to use it. Datawrapper leads you through a quick, simple 4-step process from uploading data to publishing your chart. This service helps you on the way. If you still have any questions in mind, Datawrapper offers >100 how-to articles and great support to you.
Datawrapper visualizations offer professional, on-brand design and great layout on all devices. The Datawrapper team has delved into the data visualization field for years and work as practitioners in international newsrooms such as the New York Times, NPR, Deutsche Welle, Bloomberg, Correctiv, and ZEIT Online. They know a good chart design. Datawrapper’s design defaults keep your visualizations easy to understand. Your charts will be visually delightful and readable on desktop, tablets, smartphones, in your reports, or in print. And you can create a custom design theme so that everyone in your team creates white-labeled visualizations in your brand design.
Datawrapper offers three plans:
Create and publish unlimited charts, maps & tables, export them as PNGs and collaborate in teams for free.
With the Custom plan for $599/month, your visualizations will come in your company design and you can export them as PDFs and SVGs.
The Enterprise plan includes on-premise installations, custom chart types, support & SLA agreements, and self-hosting.
User scenario
Datawrapper is used by print and online newsrooms, financial institutions, government departments, think tanks, and universities. Learn…
how a stats office in Belgium uses it to make statistics a public good
how the biggest newspaper in Norway transitioned from print to digital-first with Datawrapper
why a D.C.-based think tank switched to Datawrapper after building an internal charting tool
3.FineReport
finereport
FineReport is a smart reporting and dashboard software designed for enterprises to meet the visualization needs in business.
The advantage of FineReport
FineReport provides impressive self-developed HTML5 charts that can be smoothly displayed on any website or cool 3D web page with dynamic effects. It adapts to any screen size, from TVs and large screens to mobile devices.
Besides the real-time display, the innovative data entry function allows you to input the data directly into the databases via online forms so as to collect data and update your databases.
As a 100% Java software, it is compatible with any business systems and helps you integrate and visualize your business data in a comprehensive manner.
The prices of the product and service
For personal use, FineReport is free without time and function limits.
For enterprise use, FineReport is quote-based.
User scenario
Based on the data entry and visualization features, it is convenient to integrate FineReport with other business systems to automate reports or construct business applications such as an attendance system, ordering application, etc.
Thanks to the adaptive display, you can show KPI dashboards on TV screens in the conference, or display the cool dashboard on large screens in the industry expo.
4.FeedbackWhiz
FeedbackWhiz helps Amazon sellers increase profits and reviews.
It can monitor, manage, and automate emails, product reviews, orders, and feedback; build professional email templates using buttons, gifs, and emojis; A/B test subject lines and view open rate analytics; send or exclude emails based on triggers such as refunds, shipment, delivery, and feedback.
Instant notifications available when reviews are posted. It helps monitor all product reviews and listings; and users will get alerts when reviews, hijackers, buy-box loss, and listing changes occur. A comprehensive profit and loss tool allows you to customize and view data for all your ASINS to get real-time accurate profits and compare them easily across all ASINs and marketplaces.
The functions - Email Automation, Listing Monitoring, Product Review Monitoring, and Profit and Loss Tool will give Amazon sellers systematic insight into their business.
FeedbackWhiz offers Free Plan and Paid Plans depending on the package.
5.Adobe Spark Post
adobe
The great thing about Adobe Spark, a free infographic maker, is the ease of use. Without any coding or design skills, you can generate bespoke visuals that deliver information in the most engaging way with our pre-made templates. You don’t have to worry about your marketing budget, and you can remain in charge of the design process while sitting at your own desk.
6.Octoparase
Octoparse is a visualization web scraping tool. Compared with a data visualization tool, it’s pretty much a tool that helps you get data from all over the internet world. For example, if you’re an Amazon seller, you could use Octoparse to scrape Amazon product data for product selection, competitor monitoring, and so on. Of course, you can scrape recruitment information to create your own recruitment website OR application to start your own business.
Anyway, Octoparse is a handy tool to help you get all data that everyone can read online. It’s free to start. Of course, if you want to use the premium function to achieve high-speed and large-scale data scraping, you could try the premium function, starting from $89/month.
Conclusion
We are overwhelmed by boundless data. However, both small, medium-sized businesses and large enterprises need to take data management seriously thus to be able to survive in this highly competitive age. Professional, easy-to-use data visualization tools empower companies to extract actionable insights from their data. We can establish a data-driven business culture by making data analytics accessible for business users.
We hope the use of these tools can inspire you to make better business decisions and help with your business growth in the year 2020.
https://www.octoparse.com/blog/top-visualization-tool-both-free-and-paid
Can you believe that 70% of Internet traffic was created by spiders*? It is shockingly true! There are a lot of spiders, web crawlers or searching bots busy with their jobs on the Internet. They simulate human behavior, walking around websites, clicking buttons, checking data, and bringing back information.
find the data and scrap the data
Picture from Google
With so much traffic generated, they must have achieved something magnificent. Some of them may sound familiar to you, like price monitoring in e-Commerce businesses, social media monitoring in public relations, or research data acquisition for academic studies. Here, we’d like to dig into the 3 web-scraping applications that are rarely known but are surprisingly profitable.
Budget Airline platforms are very popular among web scrapers because of the unpredictable promotion of cheap tickets.
Airline’s original intention is to offer cheap tickets at random to attract tourists*, but scalpers found a way to make a profit out of this. The geek scalper use web crawlers to refresh the airline website continuously. Once a cheap ticket is available, the crawler will book the ticket.
Octoparse web scraping help you buy cheap tickets
Picture from Giphy
AirAsia, for example, only keeps the reservation for an hour and if the payment is not made by then, the ticket gets send back to the ticket pool and ready to sell. Scalpers will buy the ticket again at the millisecond after the ticket returns to the pool, so on and so forth. Only until you order the ticket from a scalper, then the scalpers will use the program to abandon the ticket in the AirAsia system and in 0.00001 seconds later, book it for you with your name.
It doesn’t sound like an easy job for me. Maybe the intermediary fee is quite fair.
There must be plenty of price comparison sites and cashback websites in a smart shopper’s favorites. No matter what their names are, "price comparison platforms", "e-commerce aggregate website" or "coupon websites", the ideas are the same, earning money by saving your money.
Octoparse web scraping help you get discount
Picture from Giphy
They scrape the prices and pictures from e-commerce websites and display them on their own websites.
E-Commerce moguls like Amazon know that it's hard to reverse the trends of open source*. So they start a business to sell their API with a long pricing list. It sounds like the pricing comparison websites need to do all the jobs, write codes to scrap, provide a sales channel, and pay the bills!
it's not fair
Picture from Giphy
Not so fast. Let me tell you how these aggregate e-commerce platforms make their profits:
Suppose there is a platform that aggregates several stores selling Okamoto. When people search for the product, they get to decide which store ranks first and which comes last. So long story short, whoever pays more gets ranked on the top.
okamoto price comparsion on Comparee
Picture from Comparee
If the bid for ranking is so painful (@Google AdWords), you can also take the easy way out - buy ads on the web page. Each time a visitor clicks, the website makes money.
The website can also act as an agent to earn commission fees. It’s quite easy to understand as they help stores to sell goods. Based on the belief of "the more, the merrier", there we have cashback websites coming into being.
To sum up, they are doing quite well.
For two companies who agree to share databases through API, they might still need web scraping to turn data on web pages into structural data reports.
Let’s take the big three as an example. Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion, who hold the credit files of 170 million American adults and sell more than 600 million credit reports each year, generating more than $10 billion in revenue*.
octoparse web scraping tool help you make money
Picture from Giphy
"It's a pretty simple business model, actually. They gather as much information about you from lenders, aggregate it, and sell it back to them," said Brett Horn, an industry analyst with Morningstar*.
They receive your personal behavior data from your banks, employer, local court, shopping malls, and even a petrol station. With so many reports to analyze, web-scraping is a big helper to organize the data. They can turn the web pages into structural data reports.
There are many ways you can scrape from the websites. If you want to scrape data at scale from a lot of websites, a web scraping tool comes in handy. Here is a list of top 10 web scraping tool as preference.
Web scraping is an incredible way to collect data for your business. If you are looking for a reliable web scraping service to scrape data from the web, you can try to start it with Octoparse.
https://www.octoparse.com/blog/3-web-scraping-applications-to-make-money
Every great data visualization starts with good and clean data. Most people believe that collecting big data would be a tough job, but it’s simply not true. There are thousands of free datasets available online, ready to be analyzed and visualized by anyone. Here we’ve rounded up 70 free data sources for 2020 on government, crime, health, financial and economic data, marketing and social media, journalism, and media, real estate, company directory and review, and more.
Free Data Source: Government
Data.gov: It is the first stage and acts as a portal to all sorts of amazing information on everything from climate to crime freely by the US Government.
Data.gov.uk: There are datasets from all UK central departments and a number of other public sector and local authorities. It acts as a portal to all sorts of information on everything, including business and economy, crime and justice, defense, education, environment, government, health, society, and transportation.
U.S. Census Bureau: The website is about the government-informed statistics on the lives of US citizens including population, economy, education, geography, and more.
The CIA World Factbook: Facts on every country in the world; focuses on history, government, population, economy, energy, geography, communications, transportation, military, and transnational issues for 267 countries.
Socrata: Socrata is a mission-driven software company that is another interesting place to explore government-related data with some visualization tools built-in. Its data as a service has been adopted by more than 1200 government agencies for open data, performance management, and data-driven government.
European Union Open Data Portal: It is the single point of access to a growing range of data from the institutions and other bodies of the European Union. The data boosts includes economic development within the EU and transparency within the EU institutions, including geographic, geopolitical and financial data, statistics, election results, legal acts, and data on crime, health, the environment, transport, and scientific research. They could be reused in different databases and reports. And more, a variety of digital formats are available from the EU institutions and other EU bodies. The portal provides a standardized catalog, a list of apps and web tools reusing these data, a SPARQL endpoint query editor and rest API access, and tips on how to make the best use of the site.
Canada Open Data is a pilot project with many governmental and geospatial datasets. It helps you explore how the government of Canada creates greater transparency, accountability, increases citizen engagement, and drives innovation and economic opportunities through open data, open information, and open dialogue.
Datacatalogs.org: It offers open government data from the US, EU, Canada, CKAN, and more.
U.S. National Center for Education Statistics: The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) is the primary federal entity for collecting and analyzing data related to education in the U.S. and other nations.
UK Data Service: The UK Data Service collection includes major UK government-sponsored surveys, cross-national surveys, longitudinal studies, UK census data, international aggregate, business data, and qualitative data.
Free Data Source: Crime
Uniform Crime Reporting: The UCR Program has been the starting place for law enforcement executives, students, researchers, members of the media, and the public seeking information on crime in the US.
FBI Crime Statistics: Statistical crime reports and publications detailing specific offenses and outlining trends to understand crime threats at both local and national levels.
Bureau of Justice Statistics: Information on anything related to the U.S. Criminal Justice System, including arrest-related deaths, census of jail inmates, the national survey of DNA crime labs, surveys of law enforcement gang units, etc.
National Sex Offender Search: It is an unprecedented public safety resource that provides the public with access to sex offender data nationwide. It presents the most up-to-date information as provided by each Jurisdiction.
Free Data Source: Health
U.S. Food & Drug Administration: Here you will find a compressed data file of the Drugs@FDA database. Drugs@FDA is updated daily, and this data file is updated once per week, on Tuesday.
UNICEF: UNICEF gathers evidence on the situation of children and women around the world. The data sets include accurate, nationally representative data from household surveys and other sources.
World Health Organisation: statistics concerning nutrition, disease, and health in more than 150 countries.
Healthdata.gov: 125 years of US healthcare data including claim-level Medicare data, epidemiology and population statistics.
NHS Health and Social Care Information Centre: Health datasets from the UK National Health Service. The organization produces more than 260 official and national statistical publications. This includes national comparative data for secondary uses, developed from the long-running Hospital Episode Statistics which can help local decision-makers to improve the quality and efficiency of frontline care.
Free Data Source: Financial and Economic Data
World Bank Open Data: Education statistics about everything from finances to service delivery indicators around the world.
IMF Economic Data: An incredibly useful source of information that includes global financial stability reports, regional economic reports, international financial statistics, exchange rates, directions of trade, and more.
UN Comtrade Database: Free access to detailed global trade data with visualizations. UN Comtrade is a repository of official international trade statistics and relevant analytical tables. All data is accessible through API.
Global Financial Data: With data on over 60,000 companies covering 300 years, Global Financial Data offers a unique source to analyze the twists and turns of the global economy.
Google Finance: Real-time stock quotes and charts, financial news, currency conversions, or tracked portfolios.
Google Public Data Explorer: Google's Public Data Explorer provides public data and forecasts from a range of international organizations and academic institutions including the World Bank, OECD, Eurostat and the University of Denver. These can be displayed as line graphs, bar graphs, cross-sectional plots or on maps.
U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis: U.S. official macroeconomic and industry statistics, most notably reports about the gross domestic product (GDP) of the United States and its various units. They also provide information about personal income, corporate profits, and government spending in their National Income and Product Accounts (NIPAs).
Financial Data Finder at OSU: Plentiful links to anything related to finance, no matter how obscure, including World Development Indicators Online, World Bank Open Data, Global Financial Data, International Monetary Fund Statistical Databases, and EMIS Intelligence.
National Bureau of Economic Research: Macro data, industry data, productivity data, trade data, international finance, data, and more.
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission: Quarterly datasets of extracted information from exhibits to corporate financial reports filed with the Commission.
Visualizing Economics: Data visualizations about the economy.
Financial Times: The Financial Times provides a broad range of information, news, and services for the global business community.
Free Data Source: Marketing and Social Media
Amazon API: Browse Amazon Web Services’ Public Data Sets by category for a huge wealth of information. Amazon API Gateway allows developers to securely connect mobile and web applications to APIs that run on Amazon Web (AWS) Lambda, Amazon EC2, or other publicly addressable web services that are hosted outside of AWS.
American Society of Travel Agents: ASTA is the world's largest association of travel professionals. It provides members information including travel agents and the companies whose products they sell such as tours, cruises, hotels, car rentals, etc.
Social Mention: Social Mention is a social media search and analysis platform that aggregates user-generated content from across the universe into a single stream of information.
Google Trends: Google Trends shows how often a particular search term is entered relative to the total search volume across various regions of the world in various languages.
Facebook API: Learn how to publish to and retrieve data from Facebook using the Graph API.
Twitter API: The Twitter Platform connects your website or application with the worldwide conversation happening on Twitter.
Instagram API: The Instagram API Platform can be used to build non-automated, authentic, high-quality apps and services.
Foursquare API: The Foursquare API gives you access to our world-class places database and the ability to interact with Foursquare users and merchants.
HubSpot: A large repository of marketing data. You could find the latest marketing stats and trends here. It also provides tools for social media marketing, content management, web analytics, landing pages, and search engine optimization.
Moz: Insights on SEO that includes keyword research, link building, site audits, and page optimization insights in order to help companies to have a better view of the position they have on search engines and how to improve their ranking.
Content Marketing Institute: The latest news, studies, and research on content marketing.
Free Data Source: Journalism and Media
The New York Times Developer Network– Search Times articles from 1851 to today, retrieving headlines, abstracts and links to associated multimedia. You can also search book reviews, NYC event listings, movie reviews, top stories with images and more.
Associated Press API: The AP Content API allows you to search and download content using your own editorial tools, without having to visit AP portals. It provides access to images from AP-owned, member-owned and third-party, and videos produced by AP and selected third-party.
Google Books Ngram Viewer: It is an online search engine that charts frequencies of any set of comma-delimited search strings using a yearly count of n-grams found in sources printed between 1500 and 2008 in Google's text corpora.
Wikipedia Database: Wikipedia offers free copies of all available content to interested users.
FiveThirtyEight: It is a website that focuses on opinion poll analysis, politics, economics, and sports blogging. The data and code on Github are behind the stories and interactives at FiveThirtyEight.
Google Scholar: Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. It includes most peer-reviewed online academic journals and books, conference papers, theses and dissertations, preprints, abstracts, technical reports, and other scholarly literature, including court opinions and patents.
Free Data Source: Real Estate
Castles: Castles are a successful, privately owned independent agency. Established in 1981, they offer a comprehensive service incorporating residential sales, letting and management, and surveys and valuations.
Realestate.com: RealEstate.com serves as the ultimate resource for first-time home buyers, offering easy-to-understand tools and expert advice at every stage in the process.
Gumtree: Gumtree is the first site for free classifieds ads in the UK. Buy and sell items, cars, properties, and find or offer jobs in your area is all available on the website.
James Hayward: It provides an innovative database approach to residential sales, lettings & management.
Lifull Home’s: Japan’s property website.
Immobiliare.it: Italy’s property website.
Subito: Italy’s property website.
Immoweb: Belgium's leading property website.
Free Data Source: Business Directory and Review
LinkedIn: LinkedIn is a business- and employment-oriented social networking service that operates via websites and mobile apps. It has 500 million members in 200 countries and you could find the business directory here.
OpenCorporates: OpenCorporates is the largest open database of companies and company data in the world, with in excess of 100 million companies in a similarly large number of jurisdictions. Our primary goal is to make information on companies more usable and more widely available for the public benefit, particularly to tackle the use of companies for criminal or anti-social purposes, for example, corruption, money laundering, and organized crime.
Yellowpages: The original source to find and connect with local plumbers, handymen, mechanics, attorneys, dentists, and more.
Craigslist: Craigslist is an American classified advertisements website with sections devoted to jobs, housing, personals, for sale, items wanted, services, community, gigs, résumés, and discussion forums.
GAF Master Elite Contractor: Founded in 1886, GAF has become North America’s largest manufacturer of commercial and residential roofing (Source: Fredonia Group study). Our success in growing the company to nearly $3 billion in sales has been a result of our relentless pursuit of quality, combined with industry-leading expertise and comprehensive roofing solutions. Jim Schnepper is the President of GAF, an operating subsidiary of Standard Industries. When you are looking to protect the things you treasure most, here are just some of the reasons why we believe you should choose GAF.
CertainTeed: You could find contractors, remodelers, installers or builders in the US or Canada on your residential or commercial project here.
Companies in California: All information about companies in California.
Manta: Manta is one of the largest online resources that deliver products, services, and educational opportunities. The Manta directory boasts millions of unique visitors every month who search the comprehensive database for individual businesses, industry segments, and geographic-specific listings.
EU-Startups: Directory about startups in EU.
Kansas Bar Association: Directory for lawyers. The Kansas Bar Association (KBA) was founded in 1882 as a voluntary association for dedicated legal professionals and has more than 7,000 members, including lawyers, judges, law students, and paralegals.
Free Data Source: Other Portal Websites
Capterra: Directory about business software and reviews.
Monster: Data source for jobs and career opportunities.
Glassdoor: Directory about jobs and information about the inside scoop on companies with employee reviews, personalized salary tools, and more.
The Good Garage Scheme: Directory about car service, MOT or car repair.
OSMOZ: Information about fragrance.
Octoparse: A free data extraction tool to collect all the web data mentioned above online.
https://www.octoparse.com/blog/big-data-70-amazing-free-data-sources-you-should-know-for-2017?qu=
How can you bulk download images from links for free?
To download the image for the link, you may want to look into “Bulk Image Downloaders”. Inspired by the inquires received, I decided to make a “top 5 bulk image downloader” list for you. Be sure to check out this article if you want to download images from links with zero cost. (If you are not sure how to extract the URLs of the images, check this out: How to Build an Image Crawler Without Coding)
table save
Average Rating: ★★★★
Application Type: Chrome Extension
Product Reviews: This is the image downloader I’m using. You can use it to save files on display in a window with a simple click. After you extract all the image URLs, you can enter all of them if you want to download files quickly.
Average Rating: ★★★½
Application Type: Chrome Extension
Product Reviews: You can use it for mass download large pictures instead of thumbnails with optional rules. But some users find it too complex and confusing.
Average Rating: ★★★½
Application Type: Chrome Extension
Product Reviews: If you need to bulk download images from a web page, with this extension you can download images that the page contains. Many users find it powerful and user-friendly.
Image Downloader Plus
Average Rating: ★★★
Application Type: Chrome Extension
Product Reviews: You can use it to download and scrape photos from the web. It allows you to download the selected images in a specific folder and upload them to Google Drive. But some users complain that it changes file names and resizes images to an unusable level.
Average Rating: ★★★
Application Type: Chrome Extension
Product Reviews: You can use it to bulk download images from one or multiple web pages. It supports bulk downloading images from multiple tabs. You can choose: all tabs, current tab, left of the current tab, or right of the current tab.
We are open to suggestions!
If you have any suggestions, please shoot us an email at support@octoparse.com
https://www.octoparse.com/blog/bulk-download-images-from-links-top-5-bulk-image-downloaders
Images are often the preferred medium for displaying the information across the website and you may want to save all the images from the website. However, you would find it a little difficult to extract the images alone from the website as there are many other media on the website. Here, I would take http://www.octoparse.com/ for example to introduce some free useful image extractors to satisfy your special need.
The Image Extraction tool is a free online tool to help you generate a list of images found within a designated webpage. It is very simple to use. You only need to enter the URL of the page into the built-in browser. Below is the interface of the Image Extraction Tool.
You will get the following result after entering the target URL.
You could also get the JSON or PHP code for the image data.
Save All Images is an image extractor helping you to download all the pictures in a given URL. It is very fast and easy to use. You could preview the images before saving them. It would also show you the size of the picture, which could help you better decide whether to download the images or not.
OWDIG is an online image extractor and can automatically download the images of a target URL. You could see the results below.
The tools I introduce above are for online image extraction and a single URL limit, and thus some people may find it not as powerful as they think. There are more powerful data extraction tools to extract the image. They may not download the images by itself, but they could extract the URLs of the images and then bulk download images by using a “download from URL” tool. If you are interested in this idea, you could click HERE to know more about information.
https://www.octoparse.com/blog/free-image-extractors-around-the-web
The ever-growing demand for big data drives people to dive into the ocean of data. Web crawling plays an important role in crawl the webpages that are ready to be indexed. In nowadays, the three most major ways for people to crawl web data are - Using public APIs provided by the websites; writing a web crawler program; Using automated web crawler tools. With my expertise in web scraping, I will discuss four free online web crawling (web scraping, data extraction, data scraping) tools for beginners’ reference.
A web crawling tool is designed to scrape or crawl data from websites. We can also call it web harvesting tool or data extraction tools (Actually it has many nicknames such as web crawler, web scraper, data scraping tool, spider) It scans the webpage and search for content at a fast speed and harvest data on a large scale. One good thing comes with a web crawling tool is that users are not required to process any coding skills. That said, it supposes to be user-friendly and easy to get hands-on.
In addition, a web crawler is very useful for people to gather information in a multitude for later access. A powerful web crawler should be able to export collected data into a spreadsheet or database and save them in the cloud. As a result, extracted data can be added to an existing database through an API. You can choose a web crawler tool based on your needs.
#1 Octoparse
Octoparse is known as a Windows and Mac OS desktop web crawler application. It provides cloud-based service as well, offering at least 6 cloud servers that concurrently run users’ tasks. It also supports cloud data Storage and more advanced options for cloud service. The UI is very user-friendly and there are abundant tutorials on Youtube as well as the official blog available for users to learn how to build a scraping task on their own.
#2 Import.io
Import.io provides online web scraper service now. The data storage and related techniques are all based on Cloud-based Platforms. To activate its function, the user needs to add a web browser extension to enable this tool. The user interface of Import.io is easy to get hands on. You can click and select the data fields to crawl the needed data. For more detailed instructions, you can visit their official website. Through APIs, Import.io customizes a dataset for pages without data. The cloud service provides data storage and related data processing options in its cloud platform. One can add extracted data to an existing database.
#3 Scraper Wiki
Scraper Wiki’s free plan has a fixed number of datasets. Good news to all users, their free service provides the same elegant service as the paid service. They have also made a commitment to providing journalists premium accounts without cost. Their free online web scraper allows scraping PDF version document. They have another product under Scraper Wiki called Quickcode. It is a more advanced Scraper Wiki since it is more programming environment with Python, Ruby, and Php,
#4 Dexi.io
Cloud Scraping Service in Dexi.io is designed for regular web users. It makes commitments to users in providing high-quality Cloud Service Scraping. It provides users with IP Proxy and in-built CAPTCHA resolving features that can help users scrape most of the websites. Users can learn how to use CloudScrape by clicking and pointing easily, even for beginners. Cloud hosting makes possible all the scraped data to be stored in the Cloud. API allows monitoring and remotely managing web robots. It’s CAPTCHA solving option sets CloudScrape apart from services like Import.io or Kimono. The service provides a vast variety of data integrations, so that extracted data might automatically be uploaded thru (S)FTP or into your Google Drive, DropBox, Box or AWS. The data integration can be completed seamlessly. Apart from some of those free online web crawler tools, there are other reliable web crawler tools providing online service which may charge for their service though.
Map data are increasingly important in the Internet era, generating business value and helping decision-making. Such data are widely used in industries, for example, a catering company can decide where to open a new restaurant by analyzing map data and competitors nearby.
Like the article Top 20 Web Crawling Tools to Scrape the Websites Quickly, here we selected 5 best Google Maps crawlers in 2020 and wrote reviews on features of the best crawlers out there. There are different kinds of methods to create Google Maps crawlers. Try the following methods and create your own crawler to get the data you need!
Yes, Google Maps Platform provides Places API for developers! It's one of the best ways to gather places data from Google Maps, and developers are able to get up-to-date information about millions of locations using HTTP requests via the API.
Before using Places API, you should set up an account and create your own API key. The Places API is not free and uses a pay-as-you-go pricing model. Nevertheless, the data fields provided are limited by the Places API, and thus you may not get all the data you need.
Octoparse is a free web scraping tool for non-programmers in which you can build crawlers to scrape data. Within several clicks, you are able to turn the websites into valuable data. Features within Octoparse enable you to customize the crawlers to deal with 99% complicated structure of websites and scrape data.
Moreover, there are web scraping templates for certain websites including Google Maps in Octoparse, making web scraping easier and more accessible to anyone. Just enter keywords or URL and the template will start to scrape data automatically.
Crawlers created with Octoparse including the templates can be run in both local machines or in the Cloud. Octoparse is powerful and easy-to-use, you'll learn how to build your own crawler within seconds with its industry-leading data auto-detection feature.
You can make use of powerful Python Frameworks or Libraries such as Scrapy and Beautiful Soup to customize your crawler and scrape exactly what you want. To be specific, Scrapy is a framework that is used to download, clean, store data from the web pages, and has a lot of built-in code to save you time while BeautifulSoup is a library that helps programmer quickly extract data from web pages.
In this way, you have to write codes yourself to build the crawler and deal with everything. Therefore, only those programmers who master web scraping are competent in this project.
Some projects for crawling Google Maps can be found on GitHub such as this project written in Node.js. There are plenty of good open-source projects which have already created by others, so let's not re-invent the wheels.
Even if you don't need to write the most of the codes yourself, you still need to know the rudiments and write some codes to run the script, making it difficult for those who know little about coding. Quantity and quality of the dataset are highly dependent on the open-source project on GitHub, which lacks maintenance. Also, the output can only be a .txt file, and thus if you want a large scale of data, it may not be the best way for you to get data.
Web Scraper is the most popular web scraping extension. Download the Google Chrome browser and install the extension Web Scraper and you can start to use it. You don't have to write codes or download software to scrape data, a Chrome extension will be enough for most cases.
However, the extension is not that powerful when handling complex structures of web pages or scraping some heavy data.
As a newbie, I built a web crawler and extracted 20k data successfully from the Amazon Career website. How can you set up a crawler and create a database which eventually turns to your asset at No Cost? Let's dive right in.
What is a web crawler?
A web crawler is an internet bot that indexes the content of a website on the internet. It then extracts target information and data automatically. As a result, it exports the data into a structured format (list/table/database).
Why do you need a Web Crawler, especially for Enterprises?
Imagine Google Search doesn't exist. How long will it take you to get the recipe for chicken nuggets without typing in the keyword? There are 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created each day. That said, without Google Search, it's impossible to find the information.
webscraping
From Hackernoon by Ethan Jarrell
Google Search is a unique web crawler that indexes the websites and finds the page for us. Besides the search engine, you can build a web crawler to help you achieve:
Content aggregation: it works to compile information on niche subjects from various resources into one single platform. As such, it is necessary to crawl popular websites to fuel your platform in time.
Sentiment Analysis: it is also called opinion mining. As the name indicates, it is the process to analyze public attitudes towards one product and service. It requires a monotonic set of data to evaluate accurately. A web crawler can extract tweets, reviews, and comments for analysis.
Lead generation: Every business needs sales leads. That's how they survive and prosper. Let's say you plan to make a marketing campaign targeting a specific industry. You can scrape email, phone number and public profiles from an exhibitor or attendee list of Trade Fairs, like attendees of the 2018 Legal Recruiting Summit.
How to build a web crawler as a beginner?
A. Scraping with a programming language
writing scripts with computer languages are predominantly used by programmers. It can be as powerful as you create it to be. Here is an example of a snippet of bot code.
pythonwithbeautifulsoup
From Kashif Aziz
Web scraping using Python involves three main steps:
Send an HTTP request to the URL of the webpage. It responds to your request by returning the content of webpages.
Parse the webpage. A parser will create a tree structure of the HTML as the webpages are intertwined and nested together. A tree structure will help the bot follow the paths that we created and navigate through to get the information.
Using python library to search the parse tree.
Among the computer languages for a web crawler, Python is easy-to-implement comparing to PHP and Java. It still has a steep learning curve prevents many non-tech professionals from using it. Even though it is an economic solution to write your own, it's still not sustainable regards to the extended learning cycle within a limited time frame.
However, there is a catch! What if there is a method that can get you the same results without writing a single line of code?
B. Web scraping tool comes in handy as a great alternative.
There are many options, but I use Octoparse. Let's go back to the Amazon Career webpage as an example:
Goal: build a crawler to extract administrative job opportunities including Job title, Job ID, description, basic qualification, preferred qualification and page URL.
URL: https://www.amazon.jobs/en/job_categories/administrative-support
Open Octoparse and select "Advanced Mode". Enter the above URL to set up a new task.
As one can expect, the job listings include detail-pages that spread over to multiple pages. As such, we need to set up pagination so that the crawler can navigate through. To this, click the "Next Page" button and choose "Look click Single Button" from the Action Tip Panel
As we want to click through each listing, we need to create a loop item. To do this, click one job listing. Octoparse will work its magic and identify all other job listings from the page. Choose the "Select All" command from the Action Tip Panel, then choose "Loop Click Each Element" command.
Now, we are on the detail page, and we need to tell the crawler to get the data. In this case, click "Job Title" and select "Extract the text of the selected element" command from the Action Tip Panel. As follows, repeat this step and get "Job ID", "Description," "Basic Qualification", "Preferred Qualification" and Page URL.
Once you finish setting up the extraction fields, click "Start Extraction" to execute.
octoparse_getdata
However, that's not All!
For SaaS software, it requires new users to take a considerable amount of training before thoroughly enjoy the benefits. To eliminate the difficulties to set up and use. Octoparse adds "Task Templates" covering over 30 websites for starters to grow comfortable with the software. They allow users to capture the data without task configuration.
As you gain confidence, you can use Wizard Mode to build your crawler. It has step-by-step guides to facilitate you to develop your task. For experienced experts, "Advanced Mode" should be able to extract the enterprise volume of data. Octoparse also provides rich training materials for you and your employees to get most of the software.
Final thoughts
Writing scripts can be painful as it has high initial and maintenance costs. No single web page is identical, and we need to write a script for every single site. It is not sustainable if you need to crawl many websites. Besides, websites likely changes its layout and structure. As a result, we have to debug and adjust the crawler accordingly. The web scraping tool is more practical for enterprise-level data extraction with fewer efforts and costs.
webscrapingtool_python
Consider you may have difficulties to find a web scraping tool, I compile a list of most popular scraping tools. This video can walk you through to get your device that fits your needs! Feel free to take advantage of it.
https://www.octoparse.com/blog/how-to-build-a-web-crawler-from-scratch-a-guide-for-beginners
In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to scrape Twitter data in 5 minutes without using Twitter API, Tweepy, Python, or writing a single line of code.
To extract data from Twitter, you can use an automated web scraping tool - Octoparse. As Octoparse simulates human interaction with a webpage, it allows you to pull all the information you see on any website, such as Twitter. For example, you can easily extract Tweets of a handler, tweets containing certain hashtags, or posted within a specific time frame, etc. All you need to do is to grab the URL of your target webpage and paste it into Octoparse built-in browser. Within a few point-and-clicks, you will be able to create a crawler from scratch by yourself. When the extraction is completed, you can export the data into Excel sheets, CSV, HTML, SQL, or you can stream it into your database in real-time via Octoparse APIs.
Table of contents
Step 1: Input the URL and build a pagination
Step 2: Build a loop item to extract the data
Step 3: Modify the pagination setting and execute the crawler
Before we get started, you can click here to install Octoparse on your computer. Now, let’s take a look at how to build a Twitter crawler within 3 minutes.
Step 1: Input the URL and build a pagination
Let’s say we are trying to scrape all the tweets of a certain handler. In this case, we are scraping the official Twitter account of Octoparse. As you can see, the website is loaded in the built-in browser. Usually, many websites have a “next page” button that allows Octoparse to click on and go to each page to grab more information. In this case, however, Twitter applies “Infinite scrolling” technique, which means that you need to first scroll down the page to let Twitter load a few more tweets, and then extract the data shown on the screen. So the final extraction process will work like this: Octoparse will scroll down the page a little bit, extract the tweets, scroll down a bit, extract, so on and so forth.
To let the bot scroll down the page repetitively, we can build a pagination loop by clicking on the blank area and click “loop click single element” on the Tips panel. As you can see here, a pagination loop is shown in the workflow area, this means that we’ve built a pagination successfully.
Step 2: Build a loop item to extract the data
Now, let’s extract the tweets. Let’s say we want to get the handler, publish time, text content, number of comments, retweets and likes.
First, let’s build an extraction loop to get the tweets one by one. We can hover the cursor on the corner of the first tweet and click on it. When the whole tweet is highlighted in green, it means that it is selected. Repeat this action on the second tweet. As you can see, Octoparse is an intelligent bot and it has automatically selected all the following tweets for you. Click on “extract text of the selected elements” and you will find an extraction loop is built in the workflow.
But we want to extract different data fields into separate columns instead of just one, so we need to modify the extraction settings to select our target data manually. It is very easy to do this. Make sure you go into the "action setting" of the “extract data” step. Click on the handler, and click “extract the text of the selected element”. Repeat this action to get all the data fields you want. Once you are finished, delete the first giant column which we don’t need and save the crawler. Now, our final step awaits.
Step 3: Modify the pagination setting and execute the crawler
We’ve built a pagination loop earlier, but we still need a little modification on the workflow setting. As we want Twitter to load the content fully before the bot extracts it, let’s set up the AJAX time out as 5 seconds, to give Twitter 5 seconds to load after each scroll. Then, let’s set up both the scroll repeats and the wait time as 2 to make sure that Twitter loads the content successfully. Now, for each scroll, Octoparse will scroll down for 2 screens, and each screen will take 2 seconds.
Head back to the loop item setting to edit the loop time to 20. This means that the bot will repeat the scrolling for 20 times. You can now run the crawler on your local device to get the data, or run it on Octoparse Cloud servers to schedule your runs and save your local resource. Notice, the blanks cells in the columns mean that there is no original data on the page, so nothing is extracted.
If you have any questions on scraping Twitter or any other websites, email us at support@octoparse.com. We are so ready to help!
https://www.octoparse.com/blog/how-to-extract-data-from-twitter
The Portable Document Format (PDF) is a file format developed by Adobe to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. (From Wikipedia)
Nowadays people use PDF on a large scale for reading, presenting and many other purposes. And many websites store data in a PDF file for viewers to download instead of posting on the web pages, which brings changes to web scraping. You can view, save and print PDF files with ease. But the problem is, PDF is designed to keep the integrity of the file. It is more like an "electronic paper" format to make sure contents would look the same on any computer at any time. So it is difficult to edit a PDF file and export data from it.
Fortunately, there are some solutions that help extract data from PDF into Excel and we are going to introduce them in this blog post.
To be honest, if you’ve only got a handful of PDF documents to extract data from, manual copy & paste is a fast way. Just open every single document, select the text you want to extract, copy & paste to the Excel file.
Sometimes when you need to copy a table, you may need to paste it to Word document first and then copy and paste from Word to Excel to have a structured table.
Obviously, this method is tedious when you have tons of files. It would be much better to let dedicated tools to automate the whole job.
PDF to Excel converters are widely available and come as desktop, web-based and even mobile solutions. The converters can transform PDF files into Excel in seconds and the process is quite streamlined- open the PDF file, click a convert button and export the Excel file. The converted file can retain not only text and images but also the formatting, fonts, and colors.
Once completed, you can then edit the spreadsheet tables. Many PDF converters even allow you directly edit images, text, and pages stored in a PDF document and export them into an Excel spreadsheet.
Adobe Acrobat, as the original developer of the PDF format, of course, includes the conversion feature. Quick and painless, you can do this on any device, including your mobile phone. Acrobat is more about converting files, and you can create, edit, export, sign, and review the documents being worked on collaboratively. It can even turn scanned documents into editable, searchable PDFs.
The PDF converters can easily convert the whole file but may not get you some specific data from it. In many cases, the only data you need can be just the tables in it. After you convert the whole file, you still need to select the tables out of the converted file.
Tabula is a popular tool for unlocking tables inside PDF files. You just need to select the table by clicking and dragging to draw a box around the table. Tabula will try to extract the data and display a preview. Then you can choose to export the table into excel.
There are quite lots of tools out there to extract data from PDFs. With these automated tools, you no longer need to rack your brains on how to get the data out of PDF files. Results may vary as each tool has its own strengths and weaknesses. Try to find one works best for you!
Here are some other top PDF to Excel tools:
smallpdf
PDFelement
Nitro Pro
cometdocs
iSkysoft PDF Converter Pro
You may also want to check out this article and find out how to extract data from websites to excel.
https://www.octoparse.com/blog/how-to-extract-pdf-into-excel
There is a lot of data presented in a table format inside the web pages. However, it could be quite difficult when you try to store the data into local computers for later access. The problem would be that the data is embedded inside the HTML which is unavailable to download in a structured format like CSV. Web scraping is the easiest way to obtain the data into your local computer.
scrape data from a table_Octoparse
table data from Unicorn Startup
I would love to introduce 3 ways of scraping data from a table to those who barely know anything about coding:
Google Sheets
Octoparse (web scraping tool)
R language (using rvest Package)
Google Sheets
In Google sheets, there is a great function, called Import Html which is able to scrape data from a table within an HTML page using a fix expression, =ImportHtml (URL, "table", num).
Step 1: Open a new Google Sheet, and enter the expression into a blank.
A brief introduction of the formula will show up.
Googlr sheet_importHTML
Step 2: Enter the URL (example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbes%27_list_of_the_world%27s_highest-paid_athletes) and adjust the index field as needed.
Google Sheet_Scrape table
With the above 2 steps, we can have the table scraped to Google sheet within minutes. Apparently, Google Sheets is a great way to help us scrape table to Google sheets directly. However, there is an obvious limitation. That would be a such mundane task if we plan scrape tables across multiple pages using Google Sheets. Consequently, you need a more efficient way to automate the process.
Scrape tables with a web scraping tool
To better illustrate my point, I will use this website to show you the scraping process, https://www.babynameguide.com/categoryafrican.asp?strCat=African
First of all, download Octoparse and launch it.
Step 1: Click Advanced Mode to start a new project.
Octoparse-Advanced Mode
Step 2: Enter the target URL into the box and click “Save URL” to open the website in Octoparse built-in browser.
Enter the URL
Step 3: Create a pagination with 3 clicks:
a) Click “B” in the browser
b) Click “Select all” in the “Action Tips” panel
c) Click “Loop click each URL” in the “Action Tips” panel
Octoparse_Pagination 1 Octoparse_Pagination 2
Now, we can see a pagination loop has been created in the workflow box.
Octoparse_Pagination 3
Step 4: Scrape a table with the below clicks.
a) Click on the first cell in the first row of the table
b) Click on the expansion icon from “Action Tips” panel until the whole row is highlighted in green color (usually the tag should be TR)
c) Click on “Select all sub-elements” in the “Action Tips” panel , then "Extract data" and “Extract data in the loop”
Octoaprse-scrape a table 1 Octoaprse-scrape a table 3 Octoaprse-scrape a table 2 Octoaprse-scrape a table 4
The loop for scraping the table is built in the workflow.
Octoaprse-scrape a table 5
Step 5: Extract data
extract data
With the above 5 steps, we’re able to get the following result.
As the pagination function is added, the whole scraping process becomes more complicated. Yet, we have to admit that Octoparse is better at dealing with scraping data in bulk.
And the most amazing part is, we don’t need to know anything about coding. That said, whether we are programmers or not, we can create our “crawler” to get the needed data all by ourselves. To obtain further knowledge of scrape data from a table or a form, please refer to Can I extract a table/form?
However, if you happen to know some knowledge about coding and want to write a script on your own, then using the rvest package of R language is the simplest way to help you scrape a table.
R language (using rvest Package)
In this case, I also use this website, https://www.babynameguide.com/categoryafrican.asp?strCat=African as an example to present how to scrape tables with rvest.
Before starting writing the codes, we need to know some basic grammars about rvest package.
html_nodes() : Select a particular part in a certain document. We can choose to use CSS selectors, like html_nodes(doc, "table td"), or xpath selectors, html_nodes(doc, xpath = "//table//td")
html_tag() : Extract the tag name. Some similar ones are html_text (), html_attr() and html_attrs()
html_table() : Parsing HTML tables and extracting them to R Framework.
Apart from the above, there are still some functions for simulating human’s browsing behaviors. For example, html_session(), jump_to(), follow_link(), back(), forward(), submit_form() and so on.
In this case, we need to use html_table() to achieve our goal, scraping data from a table.
Download R(https://cran.r-project.org/) first.
Step 1: Install rvest.
Install rvest
Step 2: Start writing codes as the below picture shows.
Library(rvest) : Import the rvest package
Library(magrittr) : Import the magrittr package
URL: The target URL
Read HTML : Access the information from the target URL
List: Read the data from the table
Step 3: After having all the code written in the R penal, click “Enter” to run the script. Now we can have the table information right away.
rvest_final result
It seems that it doesn’t take less effort in using a web scraping tool than in writing a few lines of codes to extract table data. In fact, programming does have a steep learning curve which raises the threshold for people in general getting into the real power of web scraping. This situation makes people who don't work in the tech industry harder to gain a competitive edge in leverage web data.
I hope the above tutorial will help you have a general idea of how a web scraping tool can help you achieve the same result as a programmer does with ease.
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