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Web Scraping Software

Dexi.io – how to improve performance

Intro

Some may argue that extracting 3 records per minute is not fast enough for an automated scraper (see my last post on Dexi multi-threaded jobs). However, you should realize that Dexi extractor robots behave like a full-blown modern browser and fetch all the resources that crawled pages load (CSS, JS, fonts, etc.).
In terms of performance, an extractor robot might not be as fast as a pure HTTP scraping script, but its advantage is the ability to extract data from dynamic websites which require running JavaScript code in order to generate a user-facing content. It will also be harder for anti-bot mechanisms to detect and block it.

Categories
Web Scraping Software

Mozenda web scraping and publishing of data to cloud storage

Mozenda is a cloud web scraping service (SaaS), and we’ve already reviewed it. Since our last review, Mozenda has provided more useful utility features for data extraction. Besides multi-threaded extraction & smart data aggregation, Mozenda allows users to publish extracted data to cloud storage such as Dropbox, Amazon, and Microsoft Azure. In this post we will try to explain the new Mozenda extraction and integration capabilities.

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Miscellaneous

Octoparse review

octoparse-logo

Octoparse is a new modern visual web data extraction software. It provides users a point-&-click UI to develop extraction patterns, so that scrapers can apply these patterns to structured websites. Both experienced and inexperienced users find it easy to use Octoparse to bulk extract information from websites – for most of scraping tasks no coding needed! 

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Miscellaneous

Data Scraping Studio review

dss-logoData Scraping Studio (DSS) is a new free, multi-threading studio for effective data extraction. It consists of two parts: (1) the Google Chrome extension with point-&-click interface to setup a web scraping agent and (2) the Desktop app for executing scraping agents.

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Development Web Scraping Software

The worthy alternative to dissolving scraping Kimono API

Recently I got notified of Kimono service finishing its work due to kimono team being joining another project. So many data hunters who were using this prominent free API service are now in search for a good alternative. 

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Development Web Scraping Software

Dexi.io REST API in php (example)

In this post, I’d like to demonstrate how to leverage the Dexi.io (CloudScrape) API along with its PHP Client library (also avail in Ruby and C#).

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Miscellaneous

Content Grabber self-contained (standalone) agent

As web scraping is becoming easier to use, more and more people are able to leverage the world’s web resources. As this trend grows, structured data from the web empower businesses and enable a wave of new business ideas to become a reality. Now there is a new technology on the market called: “self-contained agents” that might just make this a tsunami!

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Development

Extract browser’s Local Storage with Python

Some of you may be wondering if it’s possible to extract a web browser’s local storage by web scraping?

Categories
Development Web Scraping Software

Content Grabber with free proxy account integration for business directories scrape

Professional data extraction requires adequate proxying to keep anonymity of scraping robots. When attempting to extract large data sets (over 1M records, ex. business directories) reliable and fast proxy service is needed.

Sequentum has released the Nohodo proxy service integration for Content Grabber. Nohodo provides a free account for Content Grabber users (up to 5000 requests monthly for free). The feature is available for both trial users and regular customers. Here’s how it works…

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Featured Web Scraping Software

Dexi.io Review

dexi-medium-height-130pxDexi.io is a powerful scraping suite. This cloud scraping service provides development, hosting and scheduling tools. The suite might be compared with Mozenda for making web scraping projects and runnig them in clouds for user convenience. Yet it includes the API, each scraper being a json definition similar to other services like import.io, kimono lab and parseHub.