Recently I received a question in my mail box about scraping data aggregate sites (aka yellow pages) or business directories.
I replied to him directly, but our conversation on business directories was an interesting one that I thought you guys would find useful.
Here’s the question:
I am interested in scraping the database in such a website www.1881.no. My guess is that I would need a webdriver, like Selenium to do the job. I am very newbie to this field, but I believe if given some pointers, I can get some data out.
Could you please provide me with pointers on how to extract data from this website.
Sandeep
As a generic answer, I’ll provide you with some basics of scraping those business (and private life) directories.
OutWit Hub is a software providing simple data extraction without requiring any programming skills or advanced technical knowledge. What impressed me about Outwit Hub is its general approach to data gathering: harvest everything (links, text, images, etc.) and, then, let the user choose what is needed (sift by scrapers). The program is apt to browse over links on pages, so this feature works well if multiple chains