Continuing our research on the most popular scraping software, I decided to compare Mozenda and Visual Web Ripper on a search trends basis. What is the frequency of searches for these products online over time? I used Google Trends for this purpose, and below I share the current statistics and conclusions.

As far as the general category in Google web searches Mozenda is of higher interest when compared to Visual Web Ripper:
These trends indicate when those products actually emerged on the scrape software market –  at the end of 2009.

Categories Trends

However, Visual Web Ripper is higher in the ‘Computers & Electronics’ category:

The inquiries in the ‘Business & Industrial’ and ‘Internet & Telecom’ categories brought me “Not enough search volume to show graph” from Google Trends.

Regional interest

The regional interest is of a similar nature: both scrapers are mostly popular in the US; see the chart below (the same global spread mapping is also valid for Visual Web Ripper):

Neither top nor rising related terms have been noted by Google, so we can probably consider that the interest in these products is currently fairly moderate.

Conclusion

I consider both products to be of good interest for casual users. Nowadays the closest competitors to both products in web search interest are Outwit Hub and the long existing Screen Scraper, but this is the scope of another post. The rising popularity of cloud services also has decreased the popularity of desktop scraping tools.