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Development Guest posting Web Scraping Software

Octoparse Alternatives

Let me tell you what you already know! Octoparse is a great web scraping tool! But like every great tool, it’s got its limitations. At times, you may wonder if there are any alternatives to Octoparse. We wondered the same and put together this blog to provide you a short list of Octoparse alternatives along with their features and distinguishing factors. Let’s get started!

Categories
Development

Selenium Web Scraping in simple words

Question: What is Selenium web scraping?

Answer: A picture is better than 1000 words:selenium main diagram

So, you make a program with Python, PHP, JAVA, Ruby and whatever language you use in order to browse(), select(), click(), submit(), save(), etc.,  target web pages.

Categories
Development

Linkedin scrape guide lines

The LinkedIn crawl success rate is low; one request that a bot makes might require several retries to be successful. So, here we share the crucial Linkedin scraping guide lines.

  1. Rate limit
    Limit the crawling rate for LinkedIn. The acceptable approximate frequency is: 1 request every second, 60 requests per minute.
  2. Public pages only
    LinkedIn allows for bots only public pages; pages that are private cannot be crawled.
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.
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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.

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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.

Categories
Review

ScrapingBee, an API for web scraping

scrapingbee_smallThe web is becoming increasingly difficult to scrape. There are more and more websites using single page application frameworks like Vue.js / Angular.js / React.js and you need to use headless browsers to extract data from those websites.

Using headless Chrome on your local computer is easy. But scaling to dozens of Chrome instances in production is a difficult task. There are many problems, you need powerful servers with plenty of RAM, you’ll get into random crashes, zombie processes…

Categories
Review

Software for Web Scraping

There are many web data extraction applications and some cloud services available and they vary widely in cost and features. Here weíve summarized them to help you to make your choice. All of these programs and services have been either tested by us or have been in general use for web ripping. We hope these brief overviews and the following reviews will help you to choose a best web scraper for your purposes.

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.