15 Web Scraping Services to Extract Online Data

15 Web Scraping Services to Extract Online Data

Web Scraping or Web harvesting is a technique of extracting data from the multiple web pages. It is the process of gathering the information from world wide web. Actually, Web scraping is very tough and time-consuming process if you do not use any automation software. There are many scraping softwares or you can say scraping tools available which can extract your online data easily for your online businesses.

best-web-scraping-services-tools

Here is the list of best web scraping softwares or tools which are accepted by many organizations.

1. Import.io

Import.io is a web data extraction platform that follows the simple process to extract the web data. It builds your own datasets by importing the data from the web page & exporting the data into comma separated file format. As per the experts, Web app development company leaders and industry legends, it is the easiest way to extract your data. Import.io is having a strength to extract the data from the most complex sites. The best thing about Import.io is, without a single line of code, you can scrap a number of web pages easily.

2. Scrape Box

Scrape Box is specially designed for SEO service providing companies and the freelancers. It is the SEO tool that can be used for multipurpose SEO related stuff. It can be used for the multi purposes such as the search engine harvester, comment poster, link checker, keyword & proxy harvester, etc. Scrape Box makes SEO freelancers’ tasks easy as it is like a marketing helper which automatically does many tasks including harvesting URLs, link-building, competitive analysis, executing site audits, etc. Multi-threaded operation, Highly customizable as per your needs, low price, various free add-ons and 24/7 support are the other remarkable features that encourage people for use it.

3. CloudScrape

CloudScrape is the browser based editor or you can say data extraction tool generally used for web scraping, web crawling and big data collection in real time. It gives the facility of saving the collected data on different cloud platforms like Google Drive or Box.net. You can also export your collected data as CSV or JSON. This cloud-scraping service helps in navigation through websites, fill the form, build robots as well as extracting real time data.

4. TheWebMiner

TheWebminer is a popular company that offers high-level web data extraction solutions. It serves web scraping services along with the many more data processing solutions. It is offering automation and consulting services in the era of web data extraction. From one time scraping of the single site to daily reports of multiple competitors, TheWebMiner fulfills your all requirements down to the earth. It also provides data conversion from one format to any other format. It cleans your data by removing duplicates & other irrelevant content. Data analysis in different tiers can also be done by TheWebMiner.

5. 80legs

80legs is a powerful cum flexible web crawling service. Whether you want to use 80legs’ existing scrapers or you want to build your own scrapers, it provides the tool that can help you to scrap the data very speedily. The web scraper claims to over 6 lacs plus domains. Industry leaders like PayPal and MailChimp also use 80legs for web scraping & web crawling. High-performance web crawling with faster speed makes 80legs unique. You can run your own web crawls and/or collect data anywhere from the internet using 80legs.

6. Mozenda

Mozenda is the genuine and advanced data scraping and web data extraction tool recognized by many major brands. It comes with modern cloud-based architecture that offers fast deployment, scalability & easy accessibility. You just need to climb 3 stairs and you are done with your work. At first stair, extract your text, file or images from multiple web pages using Mozenda. At second stair, arrange your data files & export it into popular formats. At last; in the last stair, send your web data to your structured database. Mozenda is the well known because of it’s accuracy that leads to low maintenance.

7. ParseHub

ParseHub is the web browser extension that turns your dynamic websites into APIs. It also converts your poorly structured websites into the APIs without writing a code. It crawls single or multiple websites & also handles JavaScript, AJAX, cookies, redirects, sessions, etc. The user can solve major difficulties in collecting data using ParseHub.

8. Visual Web Ripper

Visual Web Ripper is one stop solution for Automated web scraping, Web harvesting and content extraction from the web. It is one type of web data extraction software that automatically comes to your website and gathers complete content structures. It also comes with some eccentric features like user-friendly visual project editor & repeatedly submit forms for all possible input values.

9. WebHose

WebHose, also known as Webhose.io is a web crawling & data integration software that provides immediate access to real-time & structured data. Continuously crawling thousands of online resources, supports in 240+ languages, covering a wide range of forums, blog platforms & news outlets, fastest integration, a variety of plans and affordable rates are the prominent features of the Webhose.io.

10. Fminer

Fminer is one of the best visual web scraping softwares. It comes with macro recorder and diagram designer. It is pretty easy to use web scraping, web harvesting, web crawling & web micro support software. Other important features are a visual design tool, ability to crawl web 2.0 dynamic websites, options of multiple crawl path navigation, multi-threaded crawling, nested data elements and captcha test, etc.

11. WebSundew

With high productivity & speed, WebSundew rules the world in terms of web scraping & web harvesting. It captures web data with high accuracy as well. It permits users to automate the entire process of extracting and storing the data from websites. It is having a facility of point and click user interface. Data extraction agent is there for given website. WebSundae also provides customer oriented professional support for any kind of query.

12. Content Grabber

Content Grabber is the perfect choice if you want to extract your data by web scraping and web automation. Customer uses this platform to build price comparison portals, market intelligence & monitoring, open source intelligence, content integration and migration, B2B integration or process automation, etc. So, you can also use Content Grabber for a similar type of services.

13. Spinn3r

Want to index blogs, news or social media? Here is the solution. Spinn3r give you the permission to fetch whole data from webblogs, news sites, social media sites, RSS & ATOM feeds, etc. It distributed with a full firehose API which handles 95% of the data indexing requirements. It provides a penetrable admin console. Full-text search, Boilerplate removal, fault tolerance, language and spam detection are the other main features of Spinn3r.

14. WinAutomation

WinAutomation is an automated tool that is specially designed to automate repetitive tasks on your computer. It automatically fills & submits web forms, automatically extracts the data from the web page into text / excel files. WinAutomation automates software robots, automate any desktop application, websites & web applications in such a modern way.

15. Outwit

Outwit is the next generation web harvesting semantic software tool. It is specialized in extracting & organizing online data and media. It will automatically discover a number of webpages or search engine results. Pro version of Outwit provides the facility to navigate from page to page in sequence of results. The tool also lets users extract links, images, email addresses & data tables.

Source:http://www.quertime.com/article/15-web-scraping-services-to-extract-online-data/

What is Web Scraping Services ?

What is Web Scraping Services ?

Web scraping is essentially a service where an algorithm driven process fetches relevant data from the depths of the internet and stores it on a centralized location (think excel sheets) which can be analyzed to draw meaningful and strategic insight.

To put things into perspective, imagine the internet as a large tank cluttered with trillions of tons of data. Now, imagine instructing something as small as a spider to go and fetch all data relevant to your business. The spider works in accordance with the instructions and starts digging deep into the tank, fetching data with an objective orientation, requesting for data wherever it is protected by a keeper and being a small spider, it fetches data even from the most granular nook and corner of the tank. Now, this spider has a briefcase where it stores all collected data in a systematic manner and returns to you after its exploration into the deep internet tank. What you have now is perfectly the data you need in a perfectly understandable format. This is exactly what a web scraping service entails except the fact that it also promises working on those briefcase data and cleaning it up for redundancies and errors and presents it to you in the form of a well consumption-ready information format and not raw unprocessed data.

Now, there is a high possibility that you may be wondering how else can you utilize this data to extract the best RoI- Return on Investment.

Here's just a handful of the most popular beneficial uses of web scraping services-

Competition Analysis

The best part about having aggressive competitors is that you just by alert monitoring of their activities, you can outpace them by enhancing off of their big move. The industries are growing rapidly, only the informed are ahead of the race.

Data Cumulation

Web scraping ensures aggregating of all data in a centralized location. Say goodbye to the cumbersome process of collecting bits and pieces of raw data and spending the night trying to make sense out of it.

Supply-chain Monitoring

While decentralization is good, the boss needs to do what a boss does- hold the reins. Track your distributors who blatantly ignore your list prices and web miscreants who are out with a mission to destroy your brand. It’s time to take charge.

Pricing Strategy

Pricing is of the most crucial aspect in the product mix and your business model- you get only one chance to make it or break it. Stay ahead of the incumbents by monitoring their pricing strategy and make the final cut to stay ahead of time.

Delta Analytics

The top tip to stay ahead in the game is to keep all your senses open to receive any change. Stay updated about everything happening around your sphere of interest and stay ahead by planning and responding to prospective changes.

Market Understanding

Understand your market well. Web scraping as a service offers you the information you need to be abreast of the continuous evolution of your market, your competitors’ responses and the dynamic preferences of your customer.

Lead Generation

We all know that a customer is the sole reason for the existence of a product or business. Lead generation is the first step to acquiring a customer. The simple equation is that more the number of leads, higher is the aggregate conversion of customers. Web scraping as a service entails receiving and creating a relevant – relevant is the key word – relevant lead generation. It is always better to target someone who is interested or needs to avail the services or product you offer.

Data Enhancement

With web extraction services, you can extract more juice out of the data you have. The ready to consume format of information that web scraping services offer allows you to match it with other relevant data points to connect the dots and draw insights for the bigger picture.

Review Analysis

Continuous improvement is the key to building a successful brand and consumer feedback is of the prime sources that will let you know where you stand in terms of the goal – customer satisfaction. Web scraping services offer a segue to understanding your customers’ review and help you stay ahead of the game by improvising.

Financial Intelligence

In the dynamic industry of finance and ever-volatile investment industry, know what’s the best use of your money. After all, the whole drama is for the money. Web scraping services offer you the benefit of using alternative data to plan your finances much more efficiently.

Research Process

The information derived from a web scraping process is almost ready to be run through for a research and analysis function. Focus on the research instead of data collection and management.

Risk & Regulations Compliance

Understanding risk and evolving regulations is important to avoid any market or legal trap. Stay updated with the evolving dynamics of the regulatory framework and the possible risks that mean significantly for your business.

Botscraper ensures that all your web scraping process is done with utmost diligence and efficiency. We at Botscraper have a single aim -  your success and we know exactly what to deliver to ensure that.

Source:http://www.botscraper.com/blog/What-is-web-scraping-service-

Three Common Methods For Web Data Extraction

Probably the most common technique used traditionally to extract data from web pages this is to cook up some regular expressions that match the pieces you want (e.g., URL's and link titles). Our screen-scraper software actually started out as an application written in Perl for this very reason. In addition to regular expressions, you might also use some code written in something like Java or Active Server Pages to parse out larger chunks of text. Using raw regular expressions to pull out the data can be a little intimidating to the uninitiated, and can get a bit messy when a script contains a lot of them. At the same time, if you're already familiar with regular expressions, and your scraping project is relatively small, they can be a great solution.

Other techniques for getting the data out can get very sophisticated as algorithms that make use of artificial intelligence and such are applied to the page. Some programs will actually analyze the semantic content of an HTML page, then intelligently pull out the pieces that are of interest. Still other approaches deal with developing "ontologies", or hierarchical vocabularies intended to represent the content domain.

There are a number of companies (including our own) that offer commercial applications specifically intended to do screen-scraping. The applications vary quite a bit, but for medium to large-sized projects they're often a good solution. Each one will have its own learning curve, so you should plan on taking time to learn the ins and outs of a new application. Especially if you plan on doing a fair amount of screen-scraping it's probably a good idea to at least shop around for a screen-scraping application, as it will likely save you time and money in the long run.

So what's the best approach to data extraction? It really depends on what your needs are, and what resources you have at your disposal. Here are some of the pros and cons of the various approaches, as well as suggestions on when you might use each one:

Raw regular expressions and code

Advantages:

- If you're already familiar with regular expressions and at least one programming language, this can be a quick solution.
- Regular expressions allow for a fair amount of "fuzziness" in the matching such that minor changes to the content won't break them.
- You likely don't need to learn any new languages or tools (again, assuming you're already familiar with regular expressions and a programming language).
- Regular expressions are supported in almost all modern programming languages. Heck, even VBScript has a regular expression engine. It's also nice because the various regular expression implementations don't vary too significantly in their syntax.

Disadvantages:

- They can be complex for those that don't have a lot of experience with them. Learning regular expressions isn't like going from Perl to Java. It's more like going from Perl to XSLT, where you have to wrap your mind around a completely different way of viewing the problem.
- They're often confusing to analyze. Take a look through some of the regular expressions people have created to match something as simple as an email address and you'll see what I mean.
- If the content you're trying to match changes (e.g., they change the web page by adding a new "font" tag) you'll likely need to update your regular expressions to account for the change.
- The data discovery portion of the process (traversing various web pages to get to the page containing the data you want) will still need to be handled, and can get fairly complex if you need to deal with cookies and such.
When to use this approach: You'll most likely use straight regular expressions in screen-scraping when you have a small job you want to get done quickly. Especially if you already know regular expressions, there's no sense in getting into other tools if all you need to do is pull some news headlines off of a site.
Ontologies and artificial intelligence

Advantages:

- You create it once and it can more or less extract the data from any page within the content domain you're targeting.
- The data model is generally built in. For example, if you're extracting data about cars from web sites the extraction engine already knows what the make, model, and price are, so it can easily map them to existing data structures (e.g., insert the data into the correct locations in your database).
- There is relatively little long-term maintenance required. As web sites change you likely will need to do very little to your extraction engine in order to account for the changes.

Disadvantages:

- It's relatively complex to create and work with such an engine. The level of expertise required to even understand an extraction engine that uses artificial intelligence and ontologies is much higher than what is required to deal with regular expressions.
- These types of engines are expensive to build. There are commercial offerings that will give you the basis for doing this type of data extraction, but you still need to configure them to work with the specific content domain you're targeting.
- You still have to deal with the data discovery portion of the process, which may not fit as well with this approach (meaning you may have to create an entirely separate engine to handle data discovery). Data discovery is the process of crawling web sites such that you arrive at the pages where you want to extract data.

When to use this approach: Typically you'll only get into ontologies and artificial intelligence when you're planning on extracting information from a very large number of sources. It also makes sense to do this when the data you're trying to extract is in a very unstructured format (e.g., newspaper classified ads). In cases where the data is very structured (meaning there are clear labels identifying the various data fields), it may make more sense to go with regular expressions or a screen-scraping application.
Screen-scraping software

Advantages:

- Abstracts most of the complicated stuff away. You can do some pretty sophisticated things in most screen-scraping applications without knowing anything about regular expressions, HTTP, or cookies.
- Dramatically reduces the amount of time required to set up a site to be scraped. Once you learn a particular screen-scraping application the amount of time it requires to scrape sites vs. other methods is significantly lowered.
- Support from a commercial company. If you run into trouble while using a commercial screen-scraping application, chances are there are support forums and help lines where you can get assistance.

Disadvantages:

- The learning curve. Each screen-scraping application has its own way of going about things. This may imply learning a new scripting language in addition to familiarizing yourself with how the core application works.
- A potential cost. Most ready-to-go screen-scraping applications are commercial, so you'll likely be paying in dollars as well as time for this solution.
- A proprietary approach. Any time you use a proprietary application to solve a computing problem (and proprietary is obviously a matter of degree) you're locking yourself into using that approach. This may or may not be a big deal, but you should at least consider how well the application you're using will integrate with other software applications you currently have. For example, once the screen-scraping application has extracted the data how easy is it for you to get to that data from your own code?

When to use this approach: Screen-scraping applications vary widely in their ease-of-use, price, and suitability to tackle a broad range of scenarios. Chances are, though, that if you don't mind paying a bit, you can save yourself a significant amount of time by using one. If you're doing a quick scrape of a single page you can use just about any language with regular expressions. If you want to extract data from hundreds of web sites that are all formatted differently you're probably better off investing in a complex system that uses ontologies and/or artificial intelligence. For just about everything else, though, you may want to consider investing in an application specifically designed for screen-scraping.

As an aside, I thought I should also mention a recent project we've been involved with that has actually required a hybrid approach of two of the aforementioned methods. We're currently working on a project that deals with extracting newspaper classified ads. The data in classifieds is about as unstructured as you can get. For example, in a real estate ad the term "number of bedrooms" can be written about 25 different ways. The data extraction portion of the process is one that lends itself well to an ontologies-based approach, which is what we've done. However, we still had to handle the data discovery portion. We decided to use screen-scraper for that, and it's handling it just great. The basic process is that screen-scraper traverses the various pages of the site, pulling out raw chunks of data that constitute the classified ads. These ads then get passed to code we've written that uses ontologies in order to extract out the individual pieces we're after. Once the data has been extracted we then insert it into a database.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Three-Common-Methods-For-Web-Data-Extraction&id=165416

Significance of Web Scraping Services For Business

Significance of Web Scraping Services For Business

Web scraping service or Web data extraction is used to gather the information from different websites for the purpose of to promote the own business or to sell the certain kinds of information to other users. It is easy to scrape information from websites by using website scraping. Web data scraping service has become an important part of businesses as it is very useful to collect desired information related to particular business. Customers determine the demand in market , they are the ruler of the market. So to grow up the business in the current competitor business world it is very essential to know the needs of customers and their preferences. Data scraping service will help you to find information related to strategies of your competitors, customer's preferences and their preferred location. Web scraping is need of every business like food, healthcare, ecommerce, software development etc. Various uses of web scraping services which is need for development of businesses are:

Due to Increase in competition there is demand for new collection for businesses across the world. The more information you have about market & competitor, better you can withstand in competitive environment. So for data collection web scraping is necessary.

Web extraction service reduces the time & gathered fast data that is required.

In early days Web scraping was done manually by searching data then copy and paste that so it was very tedious, difficult and also a time consuming. But now there are also different tools are available.so Web scraping service avoid manual work, reduce man-hour and also low cost.

To collect information from multiple sources for market analysis and research, data integration web scraping services are required.

Data extraction services help in monitoring stock prices, order status from ecommerce websites and competitor's information.

Affordable web scraping services provides most accurate and fast results that cannot be done by human. For expanding market share Web scraping services is used.

Social media provide platform for creation, access and interchange of people generated data. Social media is a richest platform to understand human behaviour and socity. So for marketing purpose in business Website scraping services will help to extract contact details like email address, website url, phone of persons from different social media websites like facebook, twitter, linkdin, yellopages etc.

Web data scraping convert unstructured data from websites in to structured data and put that data in to database.

Data scraping is used for searching indirect content on internet.

Source:http://www.sooperarticles.com/internet-articles/web-design-articles/significance-web-scraping-services-business-1554361.html