Data scraping is a process of tools and technologies used to extract structured data from web pages. The resulting structured datasets can be used for a wide variety of business intelligence, marketing and business needs.
Data scraping refers to a process that involves automating the extraction of data from a website. There are a number of ways you can collect data from websites. If you want to get data from a specific site, for example, you’ll find it easier if the data is in a specific order. Pulling information from a database or Excel file would also be much more convenient. In many cases, using freeware or open source software is not an option since they may have restrictive license agreements.
Bright Data (formerly Luminati Networks)
Bright Data is the World’s #1 Web Data platform, providing a cost-effective way to perform fast and stable public web data collection at scale, effortless conversion of unstructured data into structured data and superior customer experience, while being fully transparent and compliant. Bright Data’s next-gen Data Collector provides an automated and customized flow of data in one dashboard, no matter the size of the collection. From eCom trends and social network data to competitive intelligence and market research, data sets are tailored to your business needs. Focus on your core business by gaining access to robust data in your industry on autopilot.
Features:
- Most efficient (no-code solutions, less resources )
- Most reliable (highest quality data, better uptime, faster data, better support)
- Most flexible (premade solutions, scalable, customizable)
- Fully Compliant (transparent, reduces risk)
- 24/7 Customer Support
ParseHub
ParseHub is a free web scraping tool. This advanced web scraper allows extracting data is as easy as clicking the data you need. It is one of the best data scraping tools that allows you to download your scraped data in any format for analysis.
Features:
- Clean text & HTML before downloading data
- The easy to use graphical interface
- This website scraping tool helps you to collect and store data on servers automatically.
Octoparse
Octoparse is a robust web scraping tool that also provides web scraping services for business owners and enterprises.
- Device: As it can be installed on both Windows and Mac OS, users can scrape data with apple devices.
- Data: Web data extraction for social media, e-commerce, marketing, real-estate listing, etc.
- Function:
– handle both static and dynamic websites with AJAX, JavaScript, cookies, etc.
– extract data from a complex website that requires login and pagination.
– deal with information that is not showing on the websites by parsing the source code.
- Use cases: As a result, you can achieve automatic inventories tracking, price monitoring, and leads generation within your fingertips.
Octoparse offers different options for users with different levels of coding skills.
- The Task Template Mode enables non-coding users to turn web pages into some structured data instantly. On average, it only takes about 6.5 seconds to pull down the data behind one page and allows you to download the data to Excel. Check out what templates are most popular.
- The Advanced mode has more flexibility. This allows users to configure and edit the workflow with more options. Advance mode is used for scraping more complex websites with a massive amount of data.
- The brand new Auto-detection feature allows you to build a crawler with one click. If you are not satisfied with the auto-generated data fields, you can always customize the scraping task to let it scrape the data for you.
- The cloud services enable large data extraction within a short time frame as multiple cloud servers concurrently are running for one task. Besides that, the cloud service will allow you to store and retrieve the data at any time.
Import.io
Import.io is a SaaS web data integration software. It provides a visual environment for end-users to design and customize the workflows for harvesting data. It covers the entire web extraction lifecycle from data extraction to analysis within one platform. And you can easily integrate into other systems as well.
- Function: large-scale data scraping, capture photos and PDFs in a feasible format
- Integration: integration with data analysis tools
- Pricing: the price of the service is only presented through consultation case by case
Scrapingbee
Scrapingbee is a web scraping API that handles headless browsers and proxy management. It can execute Javascript on the pages and rotate proxies for each request so that you get the raw HTML page without getting blocked. They also have a dedicated API for Google search scraping
Features:
- Supports JavaScript rendering
- It provides automatic proxy rotation.
- You can directly use this application on Google Sheet.
- The application can be used with a chrome web browser.
- Great for scraping Amazon
- Support Google search scraping
Scraping-Bot
Scraping-Bot.io is an efficient tool to scrape data from a URL. It provides APIs adapted to your scraping needs: a generic API to retrieve the Raw HTML of a page, an API specialized in retail websites scraping, and an API to scrape property listings from real estate websites.
Features:
- JS rendering (Headless Chrome)
- High quality proxies
- Full Page HTML
- Up to 20 concurrent requests
- Geotargeting
- Allows for large bulk scraping needs
- Free basic usage monthly plan
Scraper API
Scraper API tool helps you to manage proxies, browsers, and CAPTCHAs. This allows you to get the HTML from any web page with a simple API call. It is easy to integrate as you just need to send a GET request to API endpoint with your API key and URL.
Features:
- Helps you to render JavaScript
- It allows you to customize the headers of each request as well as the request type
- The tool offers unparalleled speed and reliability which allows building scalable web scrapers
- Geolocated Rotating Proxies
Scrapestack
Scrapestack is a real-time, web scraping REST API. Over 2,000 companies use scrapestack and trust this dedicated API backed by apilayer. The scrapestack API allows companies to scrape web pages in milliseconds, handling millions of proxy IPs, browsers & CAPTCHAs.
Features:
- Uses a pool of 35+ million datacenters and global IP addresses.
- Access to 100+ global locations to originate web scraping requests.
- Allows for simultaneous API requests.
- Supports CAPTCHA solving and JavaScript rendering.
- Free & premium options.
Data Miner Google Extension
Data Miner or Scraper is an extension on Google, which helps to Scarpe data from all HTML webpages and gives you an Excel or Google sheet.
How Does it work?
This Scarper uses Xpath, JQuery, and CSS format to analysis data in HTML webpages and extracts files in the form of tables which can be saved as .csv, .xls sheets or google sheets. The Scarper supports UTF -8 (Unicode Character Encoding) which helps in scarping various files for different languages.
Features
- Scrape data from any HTML website without coding.
- It crawls single and multi-pages.
- Automatic navigation to the next page.
- This helps to Scrape pages, videos, images, emails, address, etc.,
- It supports International Language with UTF – 8.
- Automatic form-filling using Xls data and scarping.
- The scarping information is kept confidentially.
How to access Data Miner?
- Open Chrome on your PC and browser for data-miner.io.
- Then tap on sign in and add your google account to access data miner.
- After signing in enjoy scraping for free.
- You can also add this to the Google extension.
How To Choose A Web Scraping Tool
There are ways to get access to web data. Even though you have narrowed it down to a web scraping tool, tools popped up in the search results with all confusing features still can make a decision hard to reach.
There are a few dimensions you may take into consideration before choosing a web scraping tool:
- Device: if you are a Mac or Linux user, you should make sure the tool support your system.
- Cloud service: cloud service is important if you want to access your data across devices anytime.
- Integration: how you would use the data later on? Integration options enable better automation of the whole process of dealing with data.
- Training: if you do not excel at programming, better make sure there are guides and support to help you throughout the data scraping journey.
- Pricing: yep, the cost of a tool shall always be taken into consideration and it varies a lot among different venders.
Conclusion
Scraping data is one of the most common automated processes for extracting information from websites, but it can also be very time consuming and tedious. Data scraping is process of extracting information from websites in real time. You can scrape any data such as videos, audio, images and get the updated data. It can be used for scraping web or HTML code too.