Categories
Web Scraping Software

The present trends in web scraping tools

 

Recently I got a question from one of the blog readers. After I replied to it, I decided to share it with a wider audience.
Question:

Hi,

I found your [web]scraping.pro site and found it very helpful, then realized the web scraper solutions rating was from 2014.  What is the best solution for today?   I have lots of sites I need to scrape, mainly search then drill-down sites.   I would like to be able to schedule the scraping to run on a daily basis.  Is there a direction you could point me?  I’m a seasoned developer by trade but am seeing all these point and click solutions (e.g. import.io) and am wondering if I should stick with Node.JS or .NET or if I should investigate some of these GUI scrapers of today.
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Categories
Development

Node.js, Puppeteer, Apify for Web Scraping (Xing scrape) – part 2

In the post we share the practical implementation (code) of the Xing companies scrape project using Node.js, Puppeteer and the Apify library. The first post, describing the project objectives, algorithm and results, is available here.

The scrape algorithm you can look at here.

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Categories
Miscellaneous

Huge JSON files view and search tool with excellent performance

Dadroit JSON Viewer LogoThe results of scraping activities are most often stored as json data, the latter having many advantages over .xml or .csv formats. Recently in one of my projects, I had to deal with JSON files of over 6Mb. Even though I managed them in Notepad++, still the proper search and count could have been better.

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Categories
Miscellaneous

Endcaptcha now solving Recaptcha V2!

endcaptchaSo far the latest developments of the services that develop captchas  (google, nucaptcha, etc.) are no match for the captcha bypassers, and Endcaptcha is living proof of it.
Endcaptcha developers have been working hard to make this new feature possible – they’re finally releasing Recaptcha V2 support!

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Categories
Uncategorized

Smartproxy Review

Getting precise and localized data is becoming difficult. Advanced proxy networks are the only thing that is keeping some companies running intense data gathering operations.

Residential proxies are in extremely high demand, and there are only a few networks available that can offer millions of IP addresses around the world. 

Smartproxy is one of those networks, rapidly growing to offer the best product in residential and data center proxies.

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Categories
Legal

Linkedin lost in court to data analytic company that scrapes Linkedin’s public profiles info

On September 9th, 2019 the UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS 1 has affirmed the former district court’s determination that a certain [data] analytic company is lawful to scrape [perform automated gathering] LinkedIn’s public profiles info. Now the historical event has happened in which a court is protecting a data extractor’s right for mass gathering openly presented business directory information.

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Categories
Development

Scraping with free or paid proxies – what is the difference?

Anything free always sounds appealing. And we are often ready to go an extra mile to avoid expenses if we can. But is it a good idea to choose the free option when it comes to using proxies for data scraping? Or should you stick to the paid ones for better results?

Let’s weigh all the pros and cons to see why you should consider using residential IP providers like Infatica, Bright Data, NetNut, Geosurf and others.

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Categories
Development

Using Modern Tools such as Node.js, Puppeteer, Apify for Web Scraping (Xing scrape)

I want to share with you the practical implementation of modern scraping tools for scraping JS-rendered websites (pages loaded dynamically by JavaScript). You can read more about scraping JS rendered content  here.

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Categories
Development Guest posting

Captcha solving with Java and why you should avoid it

In this blog post we are going to show how you can solve [Re]captcha with Java and some third party APIs, and why you should probably avoid them in the first place.
For the Python code (+ captcha API) see that post.

The post author is Kevin Sahin from ScrapingNinja.co.

Captcha solving

“Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart” is what captcha stands for. Captchas are used to prevent bots from accessing and performing actions on websites or applications.

The last one is the most used captcha mechanism, Google ReCaptcha v2. That’s why we are going to see how to “break” these captchas.

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Categories
Challenge

What are the best online resources to acquire data?

Recently I received this question: What are the best online resources to acquire data from?

The top sites for data scrape are data aggregators. Why are they top in data extraction?
They are top because they provide the fullest, most comprehensive data [sets]. The data in them are highly categorized. Therefore you do not need to crawl and fetch other resources and then combine multiple-resource data.

Those sites fall into 2 categories:

  1. Goods and services aggregators. Eg. AliExpress, Amazon, Craiglist.
  2. Personal data and companies data aggregators. Eg. Linkedin, Xing, YellowPages. For such aggregators another name is business directories.

The first category of sites and services is quite wide-spread. These sites and services promote their goods with the goal of being well-known online, to have as many backlinks as possible to them.

The second category, the business directories, does not tend to reveal its data to the public. These directories rather promote their brand and give scraping bots minimum opportunity for data acquiring*.

Consider the following picture where a company’s data aggregator gives to the user only 2 input fields: what and where.

You can find more of how to scrape data aggregators in this post.

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*You have to adhere to the ToS of each particular website/web service when you perform its data scraping.