Category: Development
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.
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.
Protected: .NET Code Guard
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$"… }
]
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.
Today, not only programmers, but also many other specialists take part in the work of websites: content managers, copywriters, designers, marketers, SEO-specialists. They do not need to know programming languages and understand the code, thanks to the fact that there are systems that allow you to manage the project through a convenient interface. The systems are called Engines or Content Management Systems (CMS). In this article we explain what it is, why sometimes you need to know the engine of someone else’s site, and share ways how you can do it: look manually or check through online services.
Lately I needed to scrape some data that are dynamically loaded by “Load more” button. A website JavaScript invokes XHR (or Ajax request) to fetch a next data portion. So, the need was to re-run those XHR with some POST parameters as variables.
So, how to make it in Node.js?
From eCommerce and market research to competitive analysis and more, web scraping has become an integral part of data collection. And for some, it’s the secret sauce for success.
But with great scraping power comes great responsibility.
Web scraping can result in IP bans and other harsh restrictions. To avoid these issues, many turn to proxies, which act as intermediaries between your requests and the target website. In this article, we’ll explore the top 3 proxy types for web scraping and focus on the key benefits of each proxy. Let’s go!