Let me tell you what you already know! Octoparse is a great web scraping tool! But like every great tool, it’s got its limitations. At times, you may wonder if there are any alternatives to Octoparse. We wondered the same and put together this blog to provide you a short list of Octoparse alternatives along with their features and distinguishing factors. Let’s get started!
…we use your personal data so we can provide the best service, tell you about products and services you may be interested in…
These or similar statements are often “tiny printed” at most of modern sites as part of Terms of Service (ToS). Below we share with you what particular data are collected from web users or app users.
Categories
Selenium Web Scraping in simple words
Question: What is Selenium web scraping?
Answer: A picture is better than 1000 words:
So, you make a program with Python, PHP, JAVA, Ruby and whatever language you use in order to browse(), select(), click(), submit(), save(), etc., target web pages.
Categories
Linkedin scrape guide lines
The LinkedIn crawl success rate is low; one request that a bot makes might require several retries to be successful. So, here we share the crucial Linkedin scraping guide lines.
- Rate limit
Limit the crawling rate for LinkedIn. The acceptable approximate frequency is: 1 request every second, 60 requests per minute. - Public pages only
LinkedIn allows for bots only public pages; pages that are private cannot be crawled.
import sys
import requests
URL = 'https://portal.bitcasa.com/login'
client = requests.session()
# Retrieve the CSRF token first
client.get(URL) # sets cookie
if 'csrftoken' in client.cookies:
# Django 1.6 and up
csrftoken = client.cookies['csrftoken']
else:
# older versions
csrftoken = client.cookies['csrf']
# Pass CSRF token both in login parameters (csrfmiddlewaretoken)
# and in the session cookies (csrf in client.cookies)
login_data = dict(username=EMAIL, password=PASSWORD, csrfmiddlewaretoken=csrftoken, next='/')
r = client.post(URL, data=login_data, headers=dict(Referer=URL))
My goal was to retrieve data from a web business directory.
Since the business directories scrape is the most challenging task (beside SERP scrape) there are some basic questions for me to answer:
- Is there any scrape protection set at that site?
- How much data is in that web business directory?
- What kind of queries can I run to find all the directory’s items?
- Online marketplaces
In the marketplaces people offer their products for sale. Similar to garage sales, but online. (eg. eCrater, www.1188.no).
Easy to scrape since they are usually free and do not tend to protect their data. - Business directories
The usually huge online directories targeted at the general audience. (eg. Yellow Pages). They do protect their data to avoid duplication and loss of audience. See some posts on this.
Categories
DataFlowKit review
Recently we encountered a new service that helps users to scrape the modern web 2.0. It’s a simple, comfortable, easy to learn service – https://dataflowkit.com
Let’s first highlight some of its outstanding features:
- Visual online scraper tool: point, click and extract.
- Javascript rendering; any interactive site scrape by headless Chrome run in the cloud
- Open-source back-end
- Scrape a website behind a login form
- Web page interactions: Input, Click, Wait, Scroll, etc.
- Proxy support, incl. Geo-target proxying
- Scraper API
- Follow the direction of robots.txt
- Export results to Google drive, DropBox, MS OneDrive.
In today’s web 2.0 many business websites utilize JavaScript to protect their content from web scraping or any other undesired bot visits. In this article we share with you the theory and practical fulfillment of how to scrape js-dependent/js-protected websites.
In this post we want to share with you a new useful JAVA library that helps to crawl and scrape Linkedin companies. Get business directories scraped!
If you are considering the Linkedin data scrape legal issues, please refer to the following post: Linkedin lost in court to data analytic company that scrapes Linkedin’s public profiles info