Data Scraping Services - Scraping Yelp Business Data With Python Scraping Script

Yelp is a great source of business contact information with details like address, postal code, contact information; website addresses etc. that other site like Google Maps just does not. Yelp also provides reviews about the particular business. The yelp business database can be useful for telemarketing, email marketing and lead generation.

Are you looking for yelp business details database? Are you looking for scraping data from yelp website/business directory? Are you looking for yelp screen scraping software? Are you looking for scraping the business contact information from the online Yelp? Then you are at the right place.

Here I am going to discuss how to scrape yelp data for lead generation and email marketing. I have made a simple and straight forward yelp data scraping script in python that can scrape data from yelp website. You can use this yelp scraper script absolutely free.

I have used urllib, BeautifulSoup packages. Urllib package to make http request and parsed the HTML using BeautifulSoup, used Threads to make the scraping faster.

Yelp Scraping Python Script

import urllib from bs4 import BeautifulSoup import re from threading import Thread #List of yelp urls to scrape url=['http://www.yelp.com/biz/liman-fisch-restaurant-hamburg','http://www.yelp.com/biz/casa-franco-caramba-hamburg','http://www.yelp.com/biz/o-ren-ishii-hamburg','http://www.yelp.com/biz/gastwerk-hotel-hamburg-hamburg-2','http://www.yelp.com/biz/superbude-hamburg-2','http://www.yelp.com/biz/hotel-hafen-hamburg-hamburg','http://www.yelp.com/biz/hamburg-marriott-hotel-hamburg','http://www.yelp.com/biz/yoho-hamburg'] i=0 #function that will do actual scraping job def scrape(ur): html = urllib.urlopen(ur).read() soup = BeautifulSoup(html) title = soup.find('h1',itemprop="name") saddress = soup.find('span',itemprop="streetAddress") postalcode = soup.find('span',itemprop="postalCode") print title.text print saddress.text print postalcode.text print "-------------------" threadlist = [] #making threads while i<len(url): t = Thread(target=scrape,args=(url[i],)) t.start() threadlist.append(t) i=i+1 for b in
threadlist: b.join()

import urllib

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

import re

from threading import Thread

 #List of yelp urls to scrape

url=['http://www.yelp.com/biz/liman-fisch-restaurant-hamburg','http://www.yelp.com/biz/casa-franco-caramba-hamburg','http://www.yelp.com/biz/o-ren-ishii-hamburg','http://www.yelp.com/biz/gastwerk-hotel-hamburg-hamburg-2','http://www.yelp.com/biz/superbude-hamburg-2','http://www.yelp.com/biz/hotel-hafen-hamburg-hamburg','http://www.yelp.com/biz/hamburg-marriott-hotel-hamburg','http://www.yelp.com/biz/yoho-hamburg']

 i=0

#function that will do actual scraping job

def scrape(ur):

           html = urllib.urlopen(ur).read()

          soup = BeautifulSoup(html)

       title = soup.find('h1',itemprop="name")

          saddress = soup.find('span',itemprop="streetAddress")

          postalcode = soup.find('span',itemprop="postalCode")

          print title.text

          print saddress.text

          print postalcode.text

          print "-------------------"

 threadlist = []

#making threads

while i<len(url):

          t = Thread(target=scrape,args=(url[i],))

          t.start()

          threadlist.append(t)

          i=i+1

for b in threadlist:

          b.join()

Recently I had worked for one German company and did yelp scraping project for them and delivered data as per their requirement. If you looking for scraping data from business directories like yelp then send me your requirement and I will get back to you with sample.

Source: http://webdata-scraping.com/scraping-yelp-business-data-python-scraping-script/

Data Mining Services

Data Mining Services, through its data mining services can mine required data for you from any of the available sources. Over the years, we have successfully catered to wide variety of outsource data mining requirements, which specifies our competency in dealing with your data mining requirements.

Based on your requirements, we can mine data from your preferred data sources, or we will use our own reliable sources to mine the data required by you. We have been using automated as well manual data mining strategies to deliver superior data mining services.

Types of data mining services delivered by us

With an extensive variety of data mining services provided by us, you will definitely be able to find the most perfect service package to cater to your requirements. Below listed are just some of the data mining services offered by us:

•    Web data mining
•    Data extraction
•    Data capture
•    Data gathering
•    Collection of required data
•    Validation of data

Outsource data mining requirements to us, and we are sure that the data mining India unit of Hi-Tech BPO Services will be able to formulate the most appropriate and cost effective solutions to include your entire requirements.

Highlights of our data mining services:

•    Most affordable rates
•    Dedicated data mining India unit
•    Latest data mining technologies used to mine all required data
•    Data will be mined, gathered, processed and validated as per your requirements
•    Mined data can be directly included into your database

Competitive advantage of using our data mining services

To mine accurate and relevant data, some level of internet knowledge is essential. And it would also consume a lot of your valuable time. With our data mining services, we will take care of all your data mining tasks, while you look after your business and its core functions.

The affordably priced data mining services delivered by the data mining India unit will also help you to save considerable amount of your money, which you can put into more productive purposes.

Source: http://www.hitechbposervices.com/data-mining.php

Improving performance for web scraping code

2 down vote favorite

I have a website in which the code scrapes other websites for getting the accurate data. While the code works good but there a decent lag in performance because the code firsts downloads the html stream from various sites(some times 9 websites), extracts the relative part and then renders the html page.

What should I do to get an optimal performance. Should I change from shared hosting (godaddy) to my own server or it has nothing to do with my hosting and I need to make changes to my code?

1 Answer

API/CSV

Ask those websites if they provide an API, or, if you don't need an up-to-date information or the information you need doesn't change frequently, if they can sell/give you for free the data itself (for example in an CSV file). Some small websites may have fancier ways to access data, like a CSV file for the older information, and an RSS feed for the changed one.

Those websites would probably be happy to help you, since providing you with an API would reduce their own CPU and bandwidth usage by you.

Profile

Screen scrapping is really ugly when it comes to performance and scaling. You may be limited by:

    your machine performance, since parsing, sometimes an invalid HTML file, takes time,

    your network speed,

    their network speed usage, i.e. how fast can you access the pages of their website depending on the restrictions they set, like the DOS protection and the number of requests per second for screen scrappers and search engine crawlers,

    their machine performance: if they spend 500 ms. to generate every page, you can't do anything to reduce this delay.

If, despite your requests to them, those websites cannot provide any convenient way to access their data, but they give you a written consent to screen scrape their website, then profile your code to determine the bottleneck. It may be the internet speed. It may be your database queries. It may be anything.

For example, you may discover that you spend too much time finding with regular expressions the relevant information in the received HTML. In that case, you would want to stop doing it wrong and use a parser instead of regular expressions, then see how this improve the performance.

You may also find that the bottleneck is the time the remote server spends generating every page. In this case, there is nothing to do: you may have the fastest server, the fastest connection and the most optimized code, the performance will be the same.

Do things in parallel:

Remember to use parallel computing wisely and to always profile what you're doing, instead of doing premature optimization, in hope that you're smarter than the profiler.

Especially when it comes to using network, you may be very surprised. For example, you may believe that making more requests in parallel will be faster, but as Steve Gibson explains in episode 345 of Security Now, this is not always the case.

Legal aspects

Also note that screen scrapping is explicitly forbidden by the conditions of use (like on IMDB) on many websites. And if nothing is said on this subject in conditions of use, it doesn't mean that you can screen scrape those websites.

The fact that the information is available publicly on the internet doesn't give you the right to copy and reuse it this way neither.

Why? you may ask. For two reasons:

    Most websites are relying on advertisement and marketing. When people use one of those websites directly, they waste some CPU/network bandwidth of the website, but in response, they may click on an ad or buy something sold on the website. When you screen scrape, your bot waste their CPU/network bandwidth, but will never click on an ad or buy something.

    Displaying the information you screen scrapped on your website can have even worse effects. Example: in France, there are two major websites selling hardware. The first one is easy and fast to use, has a nice visual design, better SEO, and in general is very well done. The second one is a crap, but the prices are lower. If you screen scrape them and give the raw results (prices with links) to your users, they will obviously click on the lower price every time, which means that the website with pretty design will have less chances to sell the products.

    People made an effort in collecting, processing and displaying some data. Sometimes they paid to get it. Why would they enjoy seeing you pulling this data conveniently and for free?

Source: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/141403/improving-performance-for-web-scraping-code/141406#141406

How to prevent getting blacklisted while scraping

Crawlers can retrieve data much quicker and in greater depth than human searchers, so bad scraping practices can have some impact on the performance of the site.

Needless to say, if a single crawler is performing multiple requests per second and/or downloading large files, a under powered server would have a hard time keeping up with requests from multiple crawlers.

Since spiders don’t bring direct organic traffic and seemingly affect the performance of the site, most site admins hate spiders and do their best to prevent them.

Lets go through how websites detect and block spiders and also know the techniques to overcome those barriers.

Most websites don’t have anti scraping mechanisms since it would affect the user experience, but some sites do not believe in open data access.

Before going through this article always keep in mind that

    A GOOD SPIDER MUST OBEY A WEBSITE’S CRAWLING POLICIES.

HOW DOES DETECTING ‘SPIDER ACTIVITY’ WORK?

A web server can use different mechanisms to detect a spider from a normal user. Here are some methods used by a site to detect a spider:

•    Unusual traffic/high download rate especially from a single client/or IP address within a short time span raises a bot alert.

•    Repetitive tasks done on website based on an assumption that a human user won’t perform the same repetitive tasks all the time.

•    The site has honeypot traps inside their pages, these honeypots are usually links which aren’t visible to a normal user but only to a spider . When a scraper/spider tries to access the link, the alarms are tripped.

Spend some time and investigate the anti-scraping mechanisms used by a site and build the spider accordingly, it will provide a better outcome in the long run and increase the longevity and robustness of your work.

EASIEST WAY TO FIND IF A SITE HATES BOTS

Check the robots.txt file if it contains line like these, It means the site doesn’t like bots. However, since most sites want to be on Google (arguably the largest scraper of websites globally ;-)) they do allow access to bots and spiders.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

This line is for preventing well-behaved bots or the bots which respect robots.txt.

Another way is CAPTCHAs irritating presence in the sites other than in authentication page.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU GET BANNED

There are two ways to ban a webspider, either by banning all accesses from a particular IP or by banning all accesses that use a specific id to access the server (most browsers and web spiders identify themselves whenever they request a page by user agents. Chrome browser for example uses Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/33.0.1750.149 Safari/537.36

The banning can be temporary or permanent. Temporary blocks can last minutes or hours.

HOW DO WE KNOW A SITE HAS BLOCKED US?

If any of the following symptoms appear on the site that you are crawling, it is a sign of being blocked or banned.

•    Showing CAPTCHA pages
•    Unusual content delivery delay
•    Frequent response with 404,301,500 errors,

also frequent appearance of these status codes are also indication of blocking.

•    401 Unauthorized
•    403 Forbidden
•    404 Not Found
•    408 Request Timeout
•    429 Too Many Requests

WEB CRAWLING BEST PRACTICES

These are the best practices we can follow to overcome the detection.

1. MAKE CRAWLING SLOWER, DO NOT DDoS THE SERVER, TREAT THEM NICELY

Use auto throttling mechanisms, which will automatically throttle crawling speed based on the load on both spider and the website, you are crawling and also adjust the spider to optimum crawling speed. The faster you crawl, the worse it is for everyone.

Put some random sleeps in between requests, Add some delays after crawled number of pages. Choose the lowest number of concurrent requests possible. These techniques make the spider looks like a human being.

2. DISGUISE YOUR REQUESTS BY ROTATING IP/PROXY

A server can easily detects a bot by checking the requests from a single IP address, So we use different IPs for making request to a server and detection rate become lesser. Make a pool of IPs that you can use and use random ones for each request.

There are several methods can be used to change the IP. Services like VPN ,shared proxies, TOR can help  and some third parties are also provides services for IP rotation.

3. USER-AGENT SPOOFING

Since every request made from a client end contains a user-agent header ,Using the same useragent multiple times leads to the detection of a bot. User agent spoofing is the best solution for this. Spoof the User agent by making a list of user agents and pick a random one for each request.

Websites do not want to block genuine users so you should try to look like one. Set your user-agent to a common web browser instead of using the library default (such as wget/version or urllib/version). You could even pretend to be the Google Bot: Googlebot/2.1; (http://www.google.com/bot.html)

You can check your user-agent string here:

http://www.whatsmyuseragent.com/

A good user-agent string list can be found here:

http://www.useragentstring.com/pages/useragentstring.php

4. BE AWARE OF HONEYPOTS

Some site designers put honeypot traps inside websites to detect web spiders, They may be links that normal user can’t see and a spider can.

When following links always take care that the link has proper visibility with no nofollow tag. Some honeypot links to detect spiders will be have the CSS style display:none or will be color disguised to blend in with the page’s background color.

5. DO NOT ALWAYS FOLLOW THE SAME CRAWLING PATTERN

Only robots follow the same crawling pattern,Sites that have intelligent anti-crawling mechanisms can easily detect spiders from finding pattern in their actions. Humans wont perform repetitive tasks a lot of times. Incorporate some random clicks on the page, mouse movements and random actions that will make a spider looks like a human client.

6. ALWAYS RESPECT THE robots.txt

All web spiders are supposed to follow rules that you place in a robots.txt file in a website, such as how frequently they are allowed to request pages, and from what directories they are allowed to crawl through. They should also be supplying a consistent valid User-Agent string that identifies the requests as a bot request.

Source: http://learn.scrapehero.com/how-to-prevent-getting-blacklisted-while-scraping/

How Web Data Extraction Services Impact Startups

Starting a business has its fair share of ebbs and flows – it can be extremely challenging to get a new business off the blocks, and extremely rewarding when everything goes according to plan and yields desired results. For startups, it is important to get the nuances of running a business right from day one. To succeed in an immensely competitive space, startups need to perform above and beyond expectation right from the start, and one of the factors that can be of great help during the growing years of a startup is web data extraction.

Web data extraction through crawling and scraping, a highly efficient information gathering process, can be used in many creative ways to bring about major change in the performance graph of a startup. With effective web data extraction services acquired by outsourcing to a reputed company, the business intelligence gathered and the numerous possibilities associated with it, web crawling and extraction services can indeed become the difference maker for a startup, propelling it to the heights of success.

What drives the success of web data extraction?

When it comes to figuring out the perfect, balanced web data collection methodology for startups, there are a lot of crucial factors that come into play. Some of these are associated with the technical aspects of data collection, the approach used, the time invested, and the tools involved. Others have more to do with the processing and analysis of collected information and its judicious use in formulating strategies to take things forward.

Web Crawling Services & Web Scraping Services

With the advent of highly professional web data extraction services providers, massive amounts of structured, relevant data can be gathered and stored in real time, and in time, productively used to further the business interests of a startup. As a new business owner, it is important to have a high-level knowledge of the modern and highly functional web scraping tools available for use. This will help to utilize the prowess of competent data extraction services. This in turn can assist both in the immediate and long-term revenue generation context.

Web Data Extraction for Startups

From the very beginning, the dynamics of startups is different from that of older, well-established businesses. The time taken by the new business entity in proving its capabilities and market position needs to be used completely and effectively. Every day of growth and learning needs to add up to make a substantial difference. In this period, every plan and strategy, every execution effort, and every move needs to be properly thought out.

In such a trying situation where there is little margin for error, it pays to have accurate, reliable, relevant and actionable business intelligence. This can put you in firm control of things by allowing you to make informed business decisions and formulate targeted, relevant and growth oriented business strategies. With powerful web crawling, the volume of data gathered is varied, accurate and relevant. This data can then be studied minutely, analyzed in detail and arranged into meaningful clusters. With this weapon in your arsenal, you can take your startup a long way with smart decisions and clever implementations.

Web data extraction is a task best handled by professionals who have had rich experience in the field. Often, in-house web scraping teams are difficult to assemble and not economically viable to maintain, especially for startups. For a better solution, you can outsource your web scraping needs to a reliable web data extraction service for data collection. This way, you can get all the relevant intelligence you need without overstraining your workforce or having to employ additional personnel to handle web scraping. The company you outsource your work to can easily scrape data from multiple sources as per your requirements, and furnish you with actionable business intelligence that can help you take a lead in a competitive market.

Different Ways for Startups to use Web Data Extraction

Web scraping can be employed for many different purposes to yield different kinds of relevant data that generate actionable insights. For a startup, the important decision is how to use this powerful technique to provide valuable information that can make a difference for the future prospects of the company. Here are some interesting possibilities when it comes to impactful web data extraction for startups –

Fishing for Social Rankings and Backlinks

One of the most important business processes for a startup is competition analysis. This is one area where web data extraction can come across as an invaluable enabler. In the past, many startups have effectively used web scraping to fish for backlinks and social rankings related to competing companies.

Backlinks are important to reach a greater mass of better-targeted audiences, which can go on to increase customer base with minimal efforts. Social ranking is also an immensely important factor, as social actions on the internet are building blocks of opinion and reputation generation in this day and age. Keeping this in mind, you can use web data extraction to scrape for social rankings and backlinks related to content generated by your competing companies. After careful analysis, it is possible to arrive at concrete conclusions regarding what your competitors are doing well, and what sells the best.

This information is gold for marketers and sales personnel, and can be used to discern exactly what needs to be done to increase social buzz, generate favorable opinion, and win over customers from your competitors. You can also use this technique to develop high authority backlinks that help with SEO, targeted reach and organic traffic for your business website. For competition analysis, web scraping is a formidable tool.

Sourcing Contact Information

Another important aspect of business that startups can never ignore is good networking. Whether it is with customers, prospective customers, industry peers, partners, or competitors, excellent networking and open, transparent communication is essential for the success of your startup. For effective communication and networking, you need a large, solid list of contact information pertaining to your exact requirements.

Scraping data from multiple web sources gives you the perfect method of achieving this. With automated, fast web scraping, you can in a short time collect a wealth of important contact information that can be leveraged in many different ways. Whether it is the formation of lasting business relationships or making potential customers aware of what you have on offer, this information has the power to propel your startup to new levels of recognition.

For Ecommerce

If you sell your products and services online and want to stay on top of the competition when it comes to variety, pricing analysis, and special deals and offers, web scraping is the way to go. For many e-commerce startups, the problem of high CTR and low conversion is a stumbling block to higher bottom lines. To remedy problems like these and to ensure better sales, it is always a good idea to have a clear insight about your competition.

Future of Retail Industry

With web data extraction, you can be always aware of what competing companies are doing in terms of pricing strategies, product diversity and special customer offers. By considering that information while evaluating and cementing your own strategies, you can always ensure that you provide better value and range of products and services than your competitors, and therefore stay ahead of the competition.

For Marketing, Brand Promotion and Advertisement

For startups, the first wave of promotion and marketing is the one that holds the key to your long-term business success. It is during this phase that the first and most important public perception of your company is formed, and the rudiments of public opinion start taking shape. For this reason, it is crucial to be on point with your marketing and promotion during the early, formative years of your business.

To achieve this, you need a clear, in-depth understanding of your target audience. You need to categorize your target audience on the basis of many factors like age, gender, demographics, income groups and tastes and preferences. Such detailed understanding can only be possible when you have a large wealth of social data pertaining to your target audience. There is no better way of achieving this than by web data extraction.

Love your brand

With the help of data extraction services, you can gather large chunks of relevant data regarding your target audience which can help you accurately evaluate the potential of each prospective customers as a possible addition to your business family. To ensure that you have a steady, early wave of customers to take your business off the blocks at a rapid pace, you need to devise marketing campaigns, promotional strategies and advertisements in accordance with the customer knowledge you drive through your web scraping efforts. This is a foolproof strategy to have marketing and promotional plans in place that achieve goals, bring in new business and provide your company with enough initial momentum to carry it through the later years of success.

To conclude, web data extraction can be a veritable tool in the hands of a startup. With the proper use and leveraging of this technique, your startup can gather the required business intelligence to shine in a competitive market and become a favorite with the customer base. Working with the right web data extraction company can be one of the most important business decisions you make as a startup owner.

Source: https://www.promptcloud.com/blog/web-data-extraction-services-for-startups/

Web Scraping Services Are Important Tools For Knowledge

Data extraction and web scraping techniques are important tools to find relevant data and information for personal or business use. Many companies, self-employed to copy and paste data from web pages. This process is very reliable, but very expensive as it is a waste of time and effort to get results. This is because the data collected and spent less resources and time required to collect these data are compared.

At present, several mining companies and their websites effective web scraping technique specifically for the thousands of pages of information developed culture can be traced. The information from a CSV file, database, XML file, or any other source with the required format is alameda. understanding of correlations and patterns in the data, so that policies can be designed to assist decision making. The information can also be stored for future reference.

The following are some common examples of data extraction process:

In order to rule through a government portal, citizens who are reliable for a given survey name removed.

Competitive pricing and data products include scraping websites

To access the web site or web design Stock download the videos and photos of scratching

Automatic Data Collection

It regularly collects data on a regular basis. Automated data collection techniques are very important because they find the company’s customer trends and market trends to help. By determining market trends, it is possible to understand customer behavior and predict the likelihood of the data will change.

The following are some examples of automated data collection:

Monitoring of special hourly rates for stocks

collects daily mortgage rates from various financial institutions

on a regular basis is necessary to check the weather

By using web scraping services, you can extract all data related to your business. Then analyzed the data to a spreadsheet or database can be downloaded and compared. Storing data in a database or in a required format and interpretation of the correlations to understand and makes it easier to identify hidden patterns.

Data extraction services, it is possible pricing, email, databases, profile data, and consistently to competitors for information about the data. Different techniques and processes designed to collect and analyze data, and has developed over time. Web Scraping for business processes that have beaten the market recently is one. It is a process from various sources such as websites and databases with large amounts of data provides.

Some of the most common methods used to scrape web crawling, text, fun, DOM analysis and include matching expression. After the process is only analyzers, HTML pages or meaning can be achieved through annotations. There are many different ways of scaling data, but more importantly is working toward the same goal. The main purpose of using web scraping service to retrieve and compile data in databases and web sites. In the business world is to remain relevant to the business process.

The central question about the relevance of web scraping contact. The process is relevant to the business world? The answer is yes. The fact that it is used by large companies in the world and many awards speaks derivatives.

Source: http://www.selfgrowth.com/articles/web-scraping-services-are-important-tools-for-knowledge

Lawyers & Attorneys Website Data Scraping Services

There are so many instances where one end’s up needing information from lawyers or bar associations. However, if you approach them directly or look for other ways to get information it might either be difficult or you might not get the information you are looking for. Thus, the best way to go about the scraping lawyer data.

Scraping lawyer data allow you to get information from various attorney websites, bar association websites, or other related websites. Using web scraping tools for getting such information makes it much easier to get all the relevant and important information without actually having to worry about the same.

If you wish to scrape data from lawyer, you are entitled to information such as lawyer name, firm names, address, contact details, history about the lawyers, educational qualifications, the bar association they are part of and much more.

Scraping lawyer data ensure that you also have images of the lawyer you are concentrating on. The result of scrape data form lawyer can be obtained in any format the user wants such as csv, excel, MySql etc. Scraping lawyer data also ensures that none of the information provided are repetitive or redundant.

If you are in need of information regarding any lawyer such as their contact details, address etc. it could end up being a huge and difficult task to get it manually or physically. Thus, taking off the help of scraping tools would ensure that you get all the needed information without actually having to bother about anything at all. The presence of lots of attorney websites and the fact that more and more lawyers are moving to the internet makes getting information easy with the help of some great tools. Scraping data is a very useful and handy method in which one can get all the required and relevant information and that too in a very easy to read format, which makes the method even worthier.

There are quite a few tools or services that you can take help of to get lawyers data scraped. Most of these services also provide with a sample demo and that free of cost. From the sample one can decide if they wish to continue with the services or try some other services. Thus, if you want any information from attorney websites or information about any lawyers, data scraping is a great way to get the same.

Source: https://3idatascraping.wordpress.com/2014/03/18/lawyers-attorneys-website-data-scraping-services/