Categories
Legal Miscellaneous

Is this a legal method of acquiring insurance leads?

Recently I received a question on insurance leads:

Is this a legal method of acquiring insurance leads [from the web]? Are there any agent testimonials on the efficiency of this type of service?

Legality issue in web scraping

With the matter of legality in web scraping, there should be a clear approach –  it depends on the website and its privacy policy. There could be at least 2 cases:

  1. Public info (prices, inventory info, public offers), i.e. everything that is not protected by copyright and available for scraping.
  2. The copyright protected info –  website Terms of Use or Terms of Service restrictions make copying and therefore web scraping illegal.
The US court of appeals has affirmed that a certain [data] analytic company is lawful to scrape data aggregator’s (LinkedIn’s) public profiles info.

So far I have no insurance agent testimonies on the efficiency of any insurance lead scrape service. The web sites I searched [on the insurance leads] have given me the impression that the customer info they gather is highly secured (not viewable). I doubt that any sites are going to expose insurance leads. In most of them the leads are available by paid subscription plans.

If there are any such websites like insurance leads directories (public insurance quotes), we might develop a scraper that consistently grabs fresh or new info for further analysis. It does save the agent’s time for re-searching, re-visiting and so on. One scraper might work with multiple directory pages for scrape.

The US district court has concluded that moderate scraping, even when against ToS, is legal.

You might find it interesting to read about web page change tracking if you only need to see updates (no data storing applied).

Categories
Miscellaneous

Death By Captcha Updated API clients

Death By Captcha is a reputable CAPTCHA solving service with more than 7 years in the Captcha Solving business. They have recently updated all their API clients, so users can experience maximum efficiency and faster solving times.

They enthusiastically recommend that users and software developers visit the API page and update their DBC API implementation in order to get the most out of it (the API and docs are available for registered users only).  The free credits are provided for users to test or implement the new client API!
[box style=’info blue’]If you tell them you saw this info through the scraping.pro blog, they’ll give you a 1K free CAPTCHAs additional credit![/box]
For further info, you may contact them directly.

Categories
Development

Charles CA certificate with OpenSSL in Windows

Today I needed to enable a Charles proxy on my Windows PC. Later I have managed the Genymotion virtual device to be monitored by the Charles proxy.

Categories
Guest posting Web Scraping Software

UiPath PDF Data Extraction

UiPath, one of the big providers of robotic process automation software, has some very interesting positioning. Unlike the other players on the market, they provide a free and fully featured community edition of their product for anybody to test and develop. The tool automates any application and is packed with all the web scraping and screen scraping capabilities for both desktop and web.  The platform also has a lively community forum featuring jobs, automation contests and knowledge-sharing between UiPath users: www.forum.uipath.com.

Categories
Development Miscellaneous

SSH connection in terminal for Linux

Given:

For SSH access in a terminal type:

$ ssh igor_user@lx567.certain.com

then enter the password (testPass) at a password prompt.

Categories
Development

Python requests vs urllib2 for JS-stuffed website scrape

Question:

The Python requests library is a useful library having tons of advantages compared to other similar libraries. However, as I was trying to retrieve the Wikipedia pagerequests.get() retrieved it only partially:

Categories
Development

Headless browser python scraper at pythonanywhere

Recently I decided to work with pythonanywhere.com for running python scripts on JS stuffed websites.

Originally I tried to leverage the dryscrape library, but I failed to do it, and a nice support explained to me: “…unfortunately dryscrape depends on WebKit, and WebKit doesn’t work with our virtualisation system.”

Categories
Development

Find XPath using web developer tools

Often for the purpose of scraping, one needs to find certain elements’ XPath on a webpage. How can one do that with browser Web developer tools, aka Web inspector? A picture is worth of thousand words.

Categories
Miscellaneous

Dexi.io – October 2016 release

dexi-miniDexi.io has put out a new October 2016 release. It includes the following feature improvements:

Categories
Development

New reCaptcha testing-ground

We want to share with our readers about a new testing-ground with reCaptcha v2.0. Since we do R&D of how to solve reCaptcha by web scripts and by captcha breaking services, it’s vital to have a reCaptcha testing ground.

This testing ground is designed according to the How to insert and configure reCaptcha post.