The internet provides us with access to an incredible amount of data and information.
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Just think about the amount of data that a simple e-commerce site might have. Including product names, models, availability, prices, descriptions, reviews, photos, discount codes, etc.
Now think of larger websites like Twitter or Amazon and the scale of the data they hold. Softraid 5 6 – high quality raid management.
Web Scraping and Data
Unfortunately, most websites do not provide users with simple access to their public data. For example, Amazon does not provide you with a way to download a spreadsheet with all the details of the products you’re interested in to make a better buying decision.
After all, Amazon doesn’t want you to make a good buying decision, they just want you to buy something.
Here is where web scraping comes in, providing you access to valuable data and information in order to make better decisions.
What is Web Scraping?
Web scraping refers to the extraction of data from a website into a new format. In most cases, the data from a website is extracted into an Excel sheet or JSON file.
Web scraping is usually an automated process done by a piece of software, although it can still be done manually. As a result, most people prefer to use web scraping software to save time and money.
While it might sound simple, web scraping can be used in numerous ways to unlock value from many different websites.
Want to learn more about web scraping? Read our definite guide on web scraping and its uses.
What is Web Scraping Used For?
Due to its versatility, web scraping can be used in various scenarios. We could spend hours reviewing each use case, but here are some of the most common.
Lead Generation
Imagine that you are working for a company that sells and distributes dental equipment for dentists. As a result, you might be interested in creating a database or spreadsheet with information about every dentist in your city.
You could create this spreadsheet manually, one by one, or you could use a web scraper to scrape a website like Yellow Pages or Yelp for information on dentist offices. Including their business names, addresses, phone numbers and more.
Interested in lead generation? Read our guide on how to power your lead generation efforts with web scraping.
Competitor Analysis / Market Research
Let’s say you are looking into starting your own e-commerce business by selling smartphone cases online. Therefore, building a database of similar product listings can provide you with insights on how to position and price your products.
For example, you could scrape Amazon and eBay listings for phone cases in order to build your database of competitor products. Tidy up 4 1 15 download free.
Interested in competitor analysis? Read our guides on how to scrape Amazon or eBay data for competitive analysis.
Statistical Analysis
Many people use web scraping to generate datasets they can later use for statistical analysis.
For example, you could use a web scraper to extract stock prices for specific companies on a daily basis and get a better sense of how a specific industry is performing overall.
On the other hand, you could also use web scraping for more “fun” statistical analysis, such as scraping sports stats that will fuel your fantasy league choices.
Other Uses
As we mentioned earlier, there are many more uses for web scraping, including:
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- Social Media scraping for sentiment analysis
- Scraping for archival purposes
- Scraping websites for research purposes
- Scraping your own site before a website migration
- Scraping data for comparison shopping
What is the Best Web Scraper?
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This question is asked a lot.
The true answer is that it depends.
Given your project’s needs and specifications, one web scraper might be better than another. We’ve actually written an in-depth guide on what makes the best web scraper and what are some must-have features.
However, we are obviously biased towards ParseHub. Not only is it incredibly powerful, versatile and easy to use (being able to scrape any dynamic website), but it is also free to download and use.
We also provide awesome customer support, in case you ever hit a snag while running your scrape jobs.
How to Scrape a Website
Now, let’s walk you through your very first web scraping project.
For this example, we are going to keep it simple. We will scrape listings from Amazon’s search result page for the term “tablet”. We will be scraping the product name, listing URL, price, review score, number of reviews and image URL.
- Make sure to download and open ParseHub.
- Click on New Project and submit the Amazon URL we’ve selected. The website will now be rendered inside the application.
- Scroll past the sponsored listings and click on the product name of the first search result.
- The product name will be highlighted in green to indicate that is has been selected. Click on the second product name to select all the listings on the page. All product names will now be highlighted in green.
- On the left sidebar, rename your selection to product.
- ParseHub is now extracting both the product name and URL. Now we will tell it to extract the product’s price.
- First, click on the PLUS(+) sign next to the product selection you created and choose the Relative Select command.
- Using the Relative Select command, click on the first product name and then on its price. An arrow will appear to connect the two data points.
- Rename your new selection to price.
- Using the icon next to your price selection, expand your selection and remove the URL extraction.
- Next, repeat steps 7-10 to also extract the product’s star rating, number of reviews and image URL. Remember to name your selection accordingly as you create them.
Your final project should look like this:
Pro Tip: Want to scrape and also download the images for every product? Read our guide on how to scrape and download images from any site, including Amazon.
Dealing with Pagination
We want to keep this project simple, but we could not pass up the chance to showcase one of ParseHub’s best features. We will now tell ParseHub to navigate beyond the first page of results and keep scraping further pages of results.
- Click on the PLUS(+) sign next to your page selection and choose the Select command.
- Now scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page and click on the “Next” page link. It will be highlighted in green to show it has been selected.
- Rename your selection to next.
- Expand your selection and remove the extract commands under it.
- Now use the PLUS(+) sign next to the next command and select the Click command.
- A pop-up will appear asking you if this a Next Page button. Click Yes and enter the number of times you’d like to repeat your scrape. For this example, we will enter 4. Then click on Repeat Current Template
Running your Scrape Job
You are now ready to run your very first web scraping job. Just click on the Get Data button on the left sidebar and then on Run.
ParseHub will now scrape all the data you’ve selected. Feel free to keep working on other tasks while the scrape job runs on our servers. Once the job is completed you will be able to download the scraped data as an Excel or JSON file.
Pro Tip: For longer and more complex scrape jobs, we recommend running a Test Run before submitting your entire project. This way, you can confirm that your project will be formatted correctly.
Your Next Web Scraping Project
Congratulations! You just completed your very first scraping job.
Combining the skills and knowledge you’ve just acquired with this guide, you are now ready to take on your next web scraping project.
Which site will you scrape next?
The perfect web scraper doesn’t exist.
However, modern technologies have allowed us to get pretty close.
And with so many options out there, it’s easy to label any web scraper as “the best” or “most powerful”, but what are the must-have features that the best web scraper should have?
Let’s break it all down.
Ease of Use
While ease of use might be a subjective matter, it is still crucial when choosing a web scraper. After all, the most powerful features will mean nothing if you can’t figure out how to use them.
When looking for a web scraper, one with an optimized UI will help you get the most out of the tool.
This can also apply to the way you set up your scraping projects. For example, a great web scraper will be able to render a webpage for you and allow you to easily select the data you’d like to scrape from the page.
In short, you would want a web scraper that is easy to navigate, set up and configure.
Read our guide on the easiest-to-use web scraper and how to scrape any website with it.
All-Around Flexibility
The internet is full of websites built with many different technologies. From static sites to dynamic sites. From social media sites to e-commerce sites. Two websites might look alike but be built with two different programming languages.
As a result, the best web scraper will be able to deal with any website you throw its way, regardless of how it is built. For example, some web scrapers are unable to render a website beyond its basic HTML code.
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On the other hand, the best web scrapers are able to render the entire webpage including HTML, CSS, JavaScript and AJAX web apps.
Powerful and Scalable
Picture this, you are running a scraping job going through hundreds of product pages, extracting all relevant product data for each entry.
Not only is the scrape running very slowly but halfway through the job, it just freezes. Time to start over again.
Now you can see how important it is for your web scraper to be both powerful and scalable.
Most popular web scrapers that come as browser extensions will run into the limitations mentioned before. The best scrapers will be able to provide reliable performance and quick scraping, no matter how large your job might be (even when dealing with millions of data points).
Cloud-Based Scraping
The point above might make you think about the resources a web scraper might utilize in your computer.
This is a fair concern, a powerful web scraping will need to heavily utilize CPU and RAM resources. In some scenarios, that might put your computer out of commission for extended periods of time while your scrape job runs.
A cloud-based web scraper circumvents these limitations by running scrape jobs on an off-site server. In most cases, these servers are provided by the developers of the web scraper.
This allows you to keep using your device for other tasks while your scrape job runs in the background. You can then be notified in-app or via email when your job is completed and ready to review/export.
Additionally, this can also be a benefit if you’re dealing with data caps from your ISP and trying to scrape thousands of URLs.
Multiple Output Formats
After your scrape job is complete, how would you like the export data to be formatted?
Most web scrapers will be able to export the scraped data as a CSV or Excel file. However, your projects might require more formats.
The best web scrapers will be able to provide additional formats such as outputting directly into Google Sheets or an API that you can connect to your site or application.
Furthermore, integration with a data visualization platform such as Tableau can be incredibly helpful too.
Looking for more advanced output formats? Check out our guide on how to scrape data from a website on to a JSON file.
Pagination and Navigation Scraping
In many cases, the data you are looking to scrape is laid out across several pages. For example, you might be looking to scrape all results for a specific product search on Amazon. This could easily result in hundreds of pages to scrape.
However, many scrapers are unable to deal with pagination and navigation through all these pages of results. This means that you would have to provide the scraper with each page’s unique URL - one by one.
That would be a pretty tedious task. But a web scraper that supports pagination and navigation will be able to click on specific parts of a page to go to the next URL (such as clicking on the “next” button at the end of a page).
Taking it a step further, some advanced web scrapers are able to perform searches and input text into form fields. That way, you can scrape search results for multiple search terms in one single scrape job.
Check out our guide on how to easily scrape multiple pages from a single website.
Automatic IP Rotation
Most popular websites try to prevent their data from being scraped. They do this in several ways, the most common being IP Blocking. When one of these sites determines that a user or bot coming from one specific IP is trying to scrape their site’s data, they might block the IP from accessing the site.
A web scraper with IP Rotation will periodically change its IP to access the site that is being scraped. This is extremely helpful for jobs that require scraping of several pages from the same website.
Plus, you would not want to get the whole office blocked from a specific site due to your web scraping jobs.
Other Features
There are many other features that the best web scraper will have. We could go on about these forever but some of them include:
- Ability to schedule projects (Daily, Weekly, etc.)
- Ability to scrape images
- Advanced Conditionals and Expressions
- Scraping complex web formats - Such as tables, maps and infinitely scrolling pages
What’s the Best Web Scraping Software?
Now that you know which features make the web scraping software, you can co-relate these to the needs of your scraping project.
If you are looking for a web scraper that has all the features mentioned in this article, ParseHub is the way to go.
You can download and run ParseHub for free and start scraping data right away.
Note: This post was originally published on August 12, 2019 and updated on September 8, 2020.