Categories
Challenge Development

Business directory simple scraper (python) at pythonanywhere

business directoryMy 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:

  1. Is there any scrape protection set at that site?
  2. How much data is in that web business directory?
  3. What kind of queries can I run to find all the directory’s items?
Categories
Challenge

Most popular web scraping targets and how to scrape them

  1. 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.
  2. 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
Review

DataFlowKit review

data-flow-kit-logoRecently 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:

  1. Visual online scraper tool: point, click and extract.
  2. Javascript rendering; any interactive site scrape by headless Chrome run in the cloud
  3. Open-source back-end
  4. Scrape a website behind a login form
  5. Web page interactions: Input, Click, Wait, Scroll, etc.
  6. Proxy support, incl. Geo-target proxying
  7. Scraper API
  8. Follow the direction of robots.txt
  9. Export results to Google drive, DropBox, MS OneDrive.
Categories
Challenge Development

Scraping a Javascript-dependent website with puppeteer

Support us by purchasing the book (under $5) on this topic.

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.

Categories
Development

JAVA library to scrape Linkedin & its data affiliates

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
Categories
Guest posting Review

Octoparse 8 vs Octoparse 7 comparison – what’s new in 8.1

Our brand new version Octoparse 8 (OP 8) just came out a few weeks ago. To help you get a better understanding of what the differences between OP 8 and 7 are, we have included all the updates in this article.

Categories
Review

Oxylabs.io at a glance

Oxylabs Logo VerticalOxylabs.io is an experienced player in the proxy market. In the past few years, they have significantly expanded their proxy pool.

Right now they have a residential proxy pool with over 60M IPs and over 2M datacenter proxies. Their residential proxies cover every country in the world (!) and offer city-level targeting. Oxylabs datacenter proxies come from 82 locations and feature 7850 subnets.

Oxylabs is mainly focused on businesses and it is reflected in their product subscription plans. But recently they have introduced a Fast-Checkout feature, where customers can purchase residential proxies in a few clicks. Together with a recently added smaller plan ($300/month for 20GB of traffic) Oxylabs becomes much more attractive for smaller customers as well.

Categories
Development

Scrape a JS Lazy load page by Python requests

The JS loading page is usually scraped by Selenium or another browser emulator. Yet, for a certain shopping website we’ve
found a way to perform a pure Python requests scrape.

Categories
Review

NetNut.io Review

Netnut.io logo

The most successful enterprises are always the ones which manage to stay a step ahead of their rivals. And to remain ahead, you have to be able to access the industry information faster and more consistently than anybody else. This is especially true for e-commerce and online retail industries, where the pricing contest is extremely fierce. Thus, the smallest developments in information processes can result in large changes in the outcomes.

Categories
Legal Monetize

What is legal: scrape, or scrape & sell, or code a scraper

Which of the following is illegal:
(1) Scrape emails from a site and send one email to each address.
(2) Scrape emails from a website and sell them.
(3) Make a scraping script and sell it without using it.
Note: The target website Terms of Use (ToU) state that no one can crawl/scrape it.