Web scraping Data platform import.io, announced last week that they have secured $3M in funding from investors that include the founders of Yahoo! and MySQL.
They also released a new beta version of the tool that is essentially a better version of their extraction tool, with some new features and a much cleaner and faster user experience.
In this article I’d love to revise few well-known methods of protecting website content from automatic scraping. Each one has its advantages and disadvantages, so you need to make your choice basing on the particular situation. None of these methods is ultimate and each one has its own ways around I will mention further.
If you are interested in browser automation or web application 
testing you may have already heard of Selenium. Since there is a lot of terminology related to this framework, it is easy for you to get lost, especially if you come to Selenium for the first time. In this article I want to save your day by providing a short and clear explanation of what is what in the Selenium project.
Selenium is a web application testing framework that allows you to write tests in many programming languages like Java, C#, Groovy, Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby. Selenium deploys on Windows, Linux, and MAC OS.
It is an open-source project, released under the Apache 2.0 license, so you can download and use it without charge.
It’s frequently required to have your actual IP address hidden when doing web scraping or, alternately, to access the website from different counties. That’s why we have anonymizers, also called anonymous proxies. These days, it is possible to find an abundance of proxy software and services. Following is a general summary of the fundamentals of proxy:
A CAPTCHA is a test to tell wether a user is human or a robot. It allows to protect web sites from robot intrusion, while allowing human users to navigate the site normally.
In this post we will scope out CAPTCHA types, services and the tools for CAPTCHA generation. Also we will investigate some CAPTCHA solving software and services and touch on new trends for CAPTCHA and bot protection techniques.
Since we have already reviewed classic web harvesting software, we want to sum up some other scraping services and crawlers, scrape plugins and other scrape related tools.
Web scraping is a sphere that can be applied to a vast variety of fields, and in turn it can require other technologies to be involved. SEO needs scrape. Proxying is one of the methods which can help you to stay masked while doing much web data extraction. Crawling is another sub-technology indispensable in scrape for unordered information sources. Data refining follows the scrape, so as to deal with the unavoidable inconsistency of harvested data.
In addition, we will consider fast scrape tools, making our life better, and some services and handy scrapers which enable us to obtain freshly extracted data or images.
Have you encountered the issue of your site being scraped and your online content being infringed? Yes, you’ve warned your content abuser with no response or you have received just some excuses. But, after Google indexing, your content does not stick out of the similar content heap of stolen material in search results? What can one do to set an alarm and enforce some consequences or even punishment?
The anti scrape bot service test has been my focus for some time now. How well can the Distil service protect the real website from scrape? The only answer comes from an actual active scrape. Here I will share the log results and conclusion of the test. In the previous post we briefly reviewed the service’s features, and now I will do the live test-drive analysis.
As we have been considering web scraping for positive use, there is also the aspect of the negative use of scraping for the purpose of stealing other bloggers’ proprietary content. Let’s consider some anti web scraping WP plugins.
As for a web content ownership the main indicator here is the indexing done mainly by Google. This means that if the content is scraped and immediately reposted, Google might be fooled to index it as the original, while the genuine source will be counted as content farming. Higher ranking sites might have better chances of being indexed earlier than sites with the original content, and the latter might even get a mark for being spam. This is not necessarily a tendency, but in the past some precedents have happened. This seems ridiculous, but through a published feed the offenders might detect and quickly scrape the original content for repost.
As we have touched on some basics on Clusters in Data Mining, we want to consider the computation techniques applied for clusters. Those techniques stand in line with the data mining for web traffic analysis.