The rise of artificial intelligence has transformed various industries, and web scraping is no exception. AI enhances web scraping by increasing efficiency, accuracy, and adaptability in data extraction processes. As businesses increasingly rely on data to drive their decisions, understanding how AI-powered techniques can optimize these scraping efforts becomes crucial for success.
Our exploration of AI in web scraping will cover various techniques and algorithms that enhance traditional methods. We’ll also delve into the challenges organizations face, from ethical concerns to technical limitations, and discuss innovative solutions that can overcome these hurdles. Real-world applications showcase how companies leverage AI to gather insights quickly and effectively, providing a practical lens through which we can view this technology.
By the end of the post, we’ll have a clearer understanding of not only the fundamentals of AI in web scraping but also its potential implications for the future of data collection and usage.
I’ve described my initial experience with Zyte AI spiders leveraging Zype API and Scrapy Cloud Units. You might find it here. Now I’d share more sobering report of what happened with the data aggregator scrape.
Recently I was given a bunch of sites to scrape, most of them being simple e-commerce. I decided to try Zyte AI powered spiders. To utilize it, I had to apply for a Zyte API subscription and access to Scrapy Cloud. Zyte AI proved to be a good choice for the fast data extraction & delivery thru spiders that are Scrapy Spiders. Below you can see my experience and the results.
I have done another “experience” post on the Zyte platform usage.
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Protected: .NET Code Guard
Recently we’ve ancounted a highly protected site — govets.com. Since the number of target brand items of the site was not big (under 3K) so I desided to get target data using the handy tools for a fast manual scrape.
Agree, it’s hard to overestimate the importance of information – “Master of information, master of situation”. Nowadays, we have everything to become a “master of situation”. We have all needed tools like spiders and parsers that could scrape various data from websites. Today we will consider scraping the Amazon with a web spider equipped with proxy services.
Windows cmd
cmd /c 'copy /y /b *.json output.json'
Windows Power Shell
2 options are here:
Get-Content *.json | Set-Content result.json
Copy-Item *.json output.json
How to wrap joined lines into valid JSON
After merging json files we append commas to the end of each line and bracket around the whole content with [ ] using eg. Notepadd++ for that. Thus we get a valid JSON:
[
{ "Full Year Tax":"145,26$"… },
{ "Full Year Tax":"139,00$"… },
{ "Full Year Tax":"100,00$"… }
]
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MangoProxy Review
MangoProxy is a Premium Proxy provider that offers various features to keep your online activity safe and secure. They don’t require you to register with your personal data, so you can use their service without worrying about any privacy issues. The company has a number of proxy packages to choose from, and each comes with unlimited bandwidth and a no-logs policy.
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Amazon scrape tip
Recently we’ve met requirements to scrape Amazon data in big quantities. So, first of all I’ve tested the data aggregator for being bot-proof or anti-bot protection. For that I used the Discord server Scraping Enthusiasts, namely Anti-bot channel.
Since Amazon is a hige data aggregator we recommend readers to get acquainted with the post Tips & Tricks for Scraping Business Directories.