Recently, import.io (a free scraping online tool) announced that they are adding another way to get data from the web: they’ll build it for you. This new “Data as a Service” program is targeted at businesses and organizations who need data, but don’t have the time or resources to devote to using the import.io tool to build it themselves. For these clients, import will curate custom datasets based on their specific requirements as well as develop custom data implementation solutions based on the organization’s in-house software.
Tag: service
Recently I decided to outsource a web scraping project to another company. I typed “web scraping service” in Google, chose six services from the first two search result pages and sent the project specifications to all of them to get quotes. Eventually I decided to go another way and did not order the services, but my experience may be useful for others who want to entrust web scraping jobs to third party services.
Import•io is a big data cloud platform that has the ambitious goal of turning the web into a database. It was founded in March, 2012, and a year later it received $1.3M in seed funding from Wellington Partners, Louis Monier and Emmanuel Javal.
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Free Online Web Scrapers
Free online web scrapers are a useful tool for gathering information and putting it into useable form. The contents of a given URL can be placed in a spreadsheet and expanded over time into a data-set. With an online web service, collected data can be merged into a new or existing database.
There are two extreme approaches for building a web scraper: to make it highly flexible and customizable but understandable for IT gurus only or to make it nice, simple and handy but limited in usage. All scraping software developers usually try to find a golden mean between these two approaches. In this article I want to introduce you to a relatively new startup, import•io, which says that anyone can scrape any data regardless of his or her IT skills.
Personally, I prefer using online tools for performing quick manipulation on different data formats like JSON, XML, CSV and so on. They’re platform independent and always within reach of my hand (since I mainly work in a browser). After we published an article about 7 best JSON viewers, I was told about Knowledge Walls, a similar service containing many tools for text data manipulation.
Recently, while surfing the web I stumbled upon an simple web scraping service named Web Scrape Master. It is a kind of RESTful web service that extracts data from a specified web site and returns it to you in JSON format.
As we are talking about web scraping, it would be a pity not to mention Yahoo Pipes, an exciting service provided by Yahoo!. This tool provides users with an intuitive graphical interface to assist them in organizing their favorite feeds and webpages into a single stream of content.
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Distil: Scrape Bot Protection Test
The anti scrape bot service test has been my focus for some time now. How well can the Distil service protect the real website from scrape? The only answer comes from an actual active scrape. Here I will share the log results and conclusion of the test. In the previous post we briefly reviewed the service’s features, and now I will do the live test-drive analysis.
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Distil Review: Anti-Scrape-Bot Service
Are you thinking of protecting your website content from theft and nonlegal scraping? Are you suspecting that some ‘innocent bots’ are continually visiting your web pages for data retrieval? Now we come to the anti scraping bot software and services. In this post we want to briefly review the new anti scrape bot service called Distil.