Wednesday, November 30, 2016

How Web Data Extraction Services Will Save Your Time and Money by Automatic Data Collection

How Web Data Extraction Services Will Save Your Time and Money by Automatic Data Collection

Data scrape is the process of extracting data from web by using software program from proven website only. Extracted data any one can use for any purposes as per the desires in various industries as the web having every important data of the world. We provide best of the web data extracting software. We have the expertise and one of kind knowledge in web data extraction, image scrapping, screen scrapping, email extract services, data mining, web grabbing.

Who can use Data Scraping Services?

Data scraping and extraction services can be used by any organization, company, or any firm who would like to have a data from particular industry, data of targeted customer, particular company, or anything which is available on net like data of email id, website name, search term or anything which is available on web. Most of time a marketing company like to use data scraping and data extraction services to do marketing for a particular product in certain industry and to reach the targeted customer for example if X company like to contact a restaurant of California city, so our software can extract the data of restaurant of California city and a marketing company can use this data to market their restaurant kind of product. MLM and Network marketing company also use data extraction and data scrapping services to to find a new customer by extracting data of certain prospective customer and can contact customer by telephone, sending a postcard, email marketing, and this way they build their huge network and build large group for their own product and company.

We helped many companies to find particular data as per their need for example.

Web Data Extraction

Web pages are built using text-based mark-up languages (HTML and XHTML), and frequently contain a wealth of useful data in text form. However, most web pages are designed for human end-users and not for ease of automated use. Because of this, tool kits that scrape web content were created. A web scraper is an API to extract data from a web site. We help you to create a kind of API which helps you to scrape data as per your need. We provide quality and affordable web Data Extraction application

Data Collection

Normally, data transfer between programs is accomplished using info structures suited for automated processing by computers, not people. Such interchange formats and protocols are typically rigidly structured, well-documented, easily parsed, and keep ambiguity to a minimum. Very often, these transmissions are not human-readable at all. That's why the key element that distinguishes data scraping from regular parsing is that the output being scraped was intended for display to an end-user.

Email Extractor

A tool which helps you to extract the email ids from any reliable sources automatically that is called a email extractor. It basically services the function of collecting business contacts from various web pages, HTML files, text files or any other format without duplicates email ids.

Screen scrapping

Screen scraping referred to the practice of reading text information from a computer display terminal's screen and collecting visual data from a source, instead of parsing data as in web scraping.

Data Mining Services

Data Mining Services is the process of extracting patterns from information. Datamining is becoming an increasingly important tool to transform the data into information. Any format including MS excels, CSV, HTML and many such formats according to your requirements.

Web spider

A Web spider is a computer program that browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner or in an orderly fashion. Many sites, in particular search engines, use spidering as a means of providing up-to-date data.

Web Grabber

Web grabber is just a other name of the data scraping or data extraction.

Web Bot

Web Bot is software program that is claimed to be able to predict future events by tracking keywords entered on the Internet. Web bot software is the best program to pull out articles, blog, relevant website content and many such website related data We have worked with many clients for data extracting, data scrapping and data mining they are really happy with our services we provide very quality services and make your work data work very easy and automatic.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?How-Web-Data-Extraction-Services-Will-Save-Your-Time-and-Money-by-Automatic-Data-Collection&id=5159023

Assuring Scraping Success with Proxy Data Scraping

Assuring Scraping Success with Proxy Data Scraping
Have you ever heard of "Data Scraping?" Data Scraping is the process of collecting useful data that has been placed in the public domain of the internet (private areas too if conditions are met) and storing it in databases or spreadsheets for later use in various applications. Data Scraping technology is not new and many a successful businessman has made his fortune by taking advantage of data scraping technology.

Sometimes website owners may not derive much pleasure from automated harvesting of their data. Webmasters have learned to disallow web scrapers access to their websites by using tools or methods that block certain ip addresses from retrieving website content. Data scrapers are left with the choice to either target a different website, or to move the harvesting script from computer to computer using a different IP address each time and extract as much data as possible until all of the scraper's computers are eventually blocked.

Thankfully there is a modern solution to this problem. Proxy Data Scraping technology solves the problem by using proxy IP addresses. Every time your data scraping program executes an extraction from a website, the website thinks it is coming from a different IP address. To the website owner, proxy data scraping simply looks like a short period of increased traffic from all around the world. They have very limited and tedious ways of blocking such a script but more importantly -- most of the time, they simply won't know they are being scraped.

You may now be asking yourself, "Where can I get Proxy Data Scraping Technology for my project?" The "do-it-yourself" solution is, rather unfortunately, not simple at all. Setting up a proxy data scraping network takes a lot of time and requires that you either own a bunch of IP addresses and suitable servers to be used as proxies, not to mention the IT guru you need to get everything configured properly. You could consider renting proxy servers from select hosting providers, but that option tends to be quite pricey but arguably better than the alternative: dangerous and unreliable (but free) public proxy servers.

There are literally thousands of free proxy servers located around the globe that are simple enough to use. The trick however is finding them. Many sites list hundreds of servers, but locating one that is working, open, and supports the type of protocols you need can be a lesson in persistence, trial, and error. However if you do succeed in discovering a pool of working public proxies, there are still inherent dangers of using them. First off, you don't know who the server belongs to or what activities are going on elsewhere on the server. Sending sensitive requests or data through a public proxy is a bad idea. It is fairly easy for a proxy server to capture any information you send through it or that it sends back to you. If you choose the public proxy method, make sure you never send any transaction through that might compromise you or anyone else in case disreputable people are made aware of the data.

A less risky scenario for proxy data scraping is to rent a rotating proxy connection that cycles through a large number of private IP addresses. There are several of these companies available that claim to delete all web traffic logs which allows you to anonymously harvest the web with minimal threat of reprisal. Companies such as offer large scale anonymous proxy solutions, but often carry a fairly hefty setup fee to get you going.

Source:http://ezinearticles.com/?Assuring-Scraping-Success-with-Proxy-Data-Scraping&id=248993

Wednesday, November 23, 2016

How to scrape search results from search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo

How to scrape search results from search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo

Search giants like Google, Yahoo and Bing made their empire on scraping others content. However, they don’t want you to scrape them. How ironic, isn’t it?

Search engine performance is a very important metric all digital marketers want to measure and improve. I’m sure you will be using some great SEO tools to check how your keywords perform. All great SEO tool comes with a search keyword ranking feature. The tools will tell you how your keywords are performing in google, yahoo bing etc.

 How will you get data from search engines If you want to build a keyword ranking app?

 These search engines have API’s but the daily query limit is very low and not useful for the commercial purpose. The only solution is to scrape search results. Search engine giants obviously know this :). Once they know that you are scraping, they will  block your IP, Period!

 How do Search engines detect bots?

 Here are the common methods of detection of bots.

* IP address: Search engines can detect if there are too many requests coming from a single IP. If a high amount of traffic is detected, they will throw a captcha.

 * Search patterns: Search engines match traffic patterns to an existing set of patterns and if there is huge variation, they will classify this as a bot.

 If you don’t have access to sophisticated technology, it is impossible to scrape search engines like google, Bing or Yahoo.

 How to avoid detection

There are some things you can do to  avoid detection.

    Scrape slowly and don’t try to squeeze everything at once.
    Switch user agents between queries
    Scrape randomly and don’t follow the same pattern
    Use intelligent IP rotations
    Clear Cookies after each IP change or disable them completely

Thanks for reading this blog post.

Source: http://blog.datahut.co/how-to-scrape-search-results-from-search-engines-like-google-bing-and-yahoo/

Thursday, October 20, 2016

What are the ethics of web scraping?

What are the ethics of web scraping?

Someone recently asked: "Is web scraping an ethical concept?" I believe that web scraping is absolutely an ethical concept. Web scraping (or screen scraping) is a mechanism to have a computer read a website. There is absolutely no technical difference between an automated computer viewing a website and a human-driven computer viewing a website. Furthermore, if done correctly, scraping can provide many benefits to all involved.

There are a bunch of great uses for web scraping. First, services like Instapaper, which allow saving content for reading on the go, use screen scraping to save a copy of the website to your phone. Second, services like Mint.com, an app which tells you where and how you are spending your money, uses screen scraping to access your bank's website (all with your permission). This is useful because banks do not provide many ways for programmers to access your financial data, even if you want them to. By getting access to your data, programmers can provide really interesting visualizations and insight into your spending habits, which can help you save money.

That said, web scraping can veer into unethical territory. This can take the form of reading websites much quicker than a human could, which can cause difficulty for the servers to handle it. This can cause degraded performance in the website. Malicious hackers use this tactic in what’s known as a "Denial of Service" attack.

Another aspect of unethical web scraping comes in what you do with that data. Some people will scrape the contents of a website and post it as their own, in effect stealing this content. This is a big no-no for the same reasons that taking someone else's book and putting your name on it is a bad idea. Intellectual property, copyright and trademark laws still apply on the internet and your legal recourse is much the same. People engaging in web scraping should make every effort to comply with the stated terms of service for a website. Even when in compliance with those terms, you should take special care in ensuring your activity doesn't affect other users of a website.

One of the downsides to screen scraping is it can be a brittle process. Minor changes to the backing website can often leave a scraper completely broken. Herein lies the mechanism for prevention: making changes to the structure of the code of your website can wreak havoc on a screen scraper's ability to extract information. Periodically making changes that are invisible to the user but affect the content of the code being returned is the most effective mechanism to thwart screen scrapers. That said, this is only a set-back. Authors of screen scrapers can always update them and, as there is no technical difference between a computer-backed browser and a human-backed browser, there's no way to 100% prevent access.

Going forward, I expect screen scraping to increase. One of the main reasons for screen scraping is that the underlying website doesn't have a way for programmers to get access to the data they want. As the number of programmers (and the need for programmers) increases over time, so too will the need for data sources. It is unreasonable to expect every company to dedicate the resources to build a programmer-friendly access point. Screen scraping puts the onus of data extraction on the programmer, not the company with the data, which can work out well for all involved.

Source: https://quickleft.com/blog/is-web-scraping-ethical/

Saturday, October 1, 2016

Scraping Yelp Business Data With Python Scraping Script

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()

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/

Tuesday, September 20, 2016

Powerful Web Scraping Software – Content Grabber Review

Powerful Web Scraping Software – Content Grabber Review

There are many web scraping software and cloud based web scraping services available in the market for extracting data from the websites. They vary widely in cost and features. In this article, I am going to introduce one such advanced web scraping tool “Content Grabber”, which is widely used and the best web scraping software in the market.

Content Grabber is used for web extraction, web scraping and web automation. It can extract content from complex websites and export it as structured data in a variety of formats like Excel Spreadsheets, XML, CSV and databases. Content Grabber can also extract data from highly dynamic websites. It can extract from AJAX-enabled websites, submit forms repeatedly to cover all possible input values, and manage website logins.

Content Grabber is designed to be reliable, scalable and customizable. It is specifically designed for users with a critical reliance on web scraping and web data extraction. It also enables you to make standalone web scraping agents which you can market and sell as your own royalty free web scraping software.

Applications of Content Grabber:

The following are the few applications of Content Grabber:

  •     Data aggregation – for example news aggregation.
  •     Competitive pricing and monitoring e.g. monitor dealers for price compliance.
  •     Financial and Market Research e.g. Make proactive buying and selling decisions by continuously receiving corporate operational data.
  •     Content Integration i.e. integration of data from various sources at one place.
  •     Business Directory Scraping – for example: yellow pages scraping, yelp scraping, superpages scraping etc.
  •     Extracting company data from yellow pages for scraping common data fields like Business Name, Address, Telephone, Fax, Email, Website and Category of Business.
  •     Extracting eBay auction data like: eBay Product Name, Store Information, Buy it Now prices, Product Price, List Price, Seller Price and many more.
  •     Extracting Amazon product data: Information such as Product title, cost, description, details, availability, shipping info, ASIN, rating, rank, etc can be extracted.

Content Grabber Features:

The following section highlights some of the key features of Content Grabber:

1. Point and Click Interface

The Content Grabber editor has an easy to use point and click interface that provides easy point and click configuration. One simply needs to click on web elements to configure website navigation and content capture.

2. Easy to Use

The Content Grabber point and click interface is so simple to use that it can easily be used by beginners and non-programmers. There is certain built in facilities that automatically detect and configure all commands. It will automatically create a list of links, lists of content, manage pagination, handle web pages, download or upload files and capture any action you perform on a web page. You can also manually configure the agent commands, so Content Grabber gives you both simplicity and control.

3. Reliable and Scalable

Content Grabber’s powerful features like testing and debugging, solid error handling and error recovery, allows agent to run in the most difficult scenarios. It easily handles and scrapes dynamic websites built with JavaScript and AJAX. Content Grabber’s Intelligent agents don’t break with most site structure changes. These features enable us to build reliable web scraping agents. There are various configurations and performance tuning options that makes Content Grabber scalable. You can build as many web scraping agents as you want with Content Grabber.

4. High Performance

Multi-threading is used to increase the performance in Content Grabber. Content Grabber uses optimized web browsers. It uses static browsers for static web pages and dynamic browsers for dynamic web pages. It has an ultra-fast HTML5 parser for ultra-fast web scraping. One can use many web browsers concurrently to boost performance.

5. Debugging, Logging and Error Handling

Content Grabber has robust support for debugging, error handling and logging. Using a debugger, you can test and debug the web scraping agents which helps you to build reliable and error free web scraping solutions because most of the issues are addressed at design time. Content Grabber allows agent logging with three detail levels: Log URLs, Log raw HTML, Log to database or file. Logs can be useful to identify problems that occurred during execution of a web scraping agent. Content Grabber supports automatic error handling and custom error handling through scripting. Error status reports can also be mailed to administrators.

6. Scripting

Content Grabber comes with a built in script editor with IntelliSense that one can use in case of some unusual requirements or to fine tune some process. Scripting can be used to control agent behaviour, content transformation, customize data export and delivery and to generate data inputs for agent.

7. Unlimited Web Scraping Agents

Content Grabber allows building an unlimited number of Self-Contained Web Scraping Agents. Self-Contained agents are a standalone executable that can be run independently, branded as your own and distributed royalty free. Content Grabber provides an easy to use and effective GUI to manage all the agents. One can view status and logs of all the agents or run and schedule the agents in one centralized location.

8. Automation

Require data on a schedule? Weekly? Everyday? Each hour? Content Grabber allows automating and publishing extracted data. Configure Content Grabber by telling what data you want once, and then schedule it to run automatically.

And much more

There are too many features that Content Grabber provides, but here are a few more that may be useful and interest you.

  •     Schedule agents
  •     Manage proxies
  •     Custom notification criteria and messages
  •     Email notifications
  •     Handle websites logins
  •     Capture Screenshots of web elements or entire web page or save as PDF.
  •     Capture hidden content on web page.
  •     Crawl entire website
  •     Input data from almost any data source.
  •     Auto scroll to load dynamic data
  •     Handle complex JAVASCRIPT and AJAX actions
  •     XPATH support
  •     Convert Images to Text
  •     CAPTCHA handling
  •     Extract data from non-HTML documents like PDF and Word Documents
  •     Multi-threading and multiple web browsers
  •     Run agent from command line.

The above features come with the Professional edition license. Content Grabber’s Premium edition license is available with the following extra features:

1. Visual Studio 2013 integration

One can integrate Content Grabber to Visual Studio and take advantages of extra powerful script editing, debugging, and unit testing.

2. Remove Content Grabber branding

One can remove Content Grabber branding from the Content Grabber agents and distribute the executable.

3. Custom Design Templates

One can customize the Content Grabber agent user interface design with custom HTML templates – e.g. add your own company branding.

4. Royalty free distribution

One can distribute the Content Grabber agent to anybody without paying royalty fees and can run agents from the command line anywhere.

5. Programming Interface

Programming interfaces like Desktop API, Web API and windows service for building and editing agents.

6. Custom Web Scraping Application Development:

Content Grabber provides API and Visual Studio Integration which developer can use to build custom web scraping applications. It provides full control of the user interface and export functionality. One can develop both Desktop as well as Web based custom web scraping applications using the Content Grabber programming interface. It is a great tool and provides opportunity for developers to build general web scraping applications and sell those to generate revenue.

Are you looking for web scraping services? Do you need any assistance related to Content Grabber? We can probably help you to achieve your scraping-based project goals. We would be more than happy to hear from you.

Source: http://webdata-scraping.com/powerful-web-scraping-software-content-grabber/

Thursday, September 8, 2016

How to Use Microsoft Excel as a Web Scraping Tool

How to Use Microsoft Excel as a Web Scraping Tool

Microsoft Excel is undoubtedly one of the most powerful tools to manage information in a structured form. The immense popularity of Excel is not without reasons. It is like the Swiss army knife of data with its great features and capabilities. Here is how Excel can be used as a basic web scraping tool to extract web data directly into a worksheet. We will be using Excel web queries to make this happen.

Web queries is a feature of Excel which is basically used to fetch data on a web page into the Excel worksheet easily. It can automatically find tables on the webpage and would let you pick the particular table you need data from. Web queries can also be handy in situations where an ODBC connection is impossible to maintain apart from just extracting data from web pages. Let’s see how web queries work and how you can scrape HTML tables off the web using them.
Getting started

We’ll start with a simple Web query to scrape data from the Yahoo! Finance page. This page is particularly easier to scrape and hence is a good fit for learning the method. The page is also pretty straightforward and doesn’t have important information in the form of links or images. Here is the URL we will be using for the tutorial:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/hp?s=GOOG

To create a new Web query:

1. Select the cell in which you want the data to appear.
2. Click on Data-> From Web
3. The New Web query box will pop up as shown below.

4. Enter the web page URL you need to extract data from in the Address bar and hit the Go button.
5. Click on the yellow-black buttons next to the table you need to extract data from.

6. After selecting the required tables, click on the Import button and you’re done. Excel will now start downloading the content of the selected tables into your worksheet.

Once you have the data scraped into your Excel worksheet, you can do a host of things like creating charts, sorting, formatting etc. to better understand or present the data in a simpler way.
Customizing the query

Once you have created a web query, you have the option to customize it according to your requirements. To do this, access Web query properties by right clicking on a cell with the extracted data. The page you were querying appears again, click on the Options button to the right of the address bar. A new pop up box will be displayed where you can customize how the web query interacts with the target page. The options here lets you change some of the basic things related to web pages like the formatting and redirections.

Apart from this, you can also alter the data range options by right clicking on a random cell with the query results and selecting Data range properties. The data range properties dialog box will pop up where you can make the required changes. You might want to rename the data range to something you can easily recognize like ‘Stock Prices’.

Auto refresh

Auto-refresh is a feature of web queries worth mentioning, and one which makes our Excel web scraper truly powerful. You can make the extracted data to be auto-refreshing so that your Excel worksheet will update the data whenever the source website changes. You can set how often you need the data to be updated from the source web page in data range options menu. The auto refresh feature can be enabled by ticking the box beside ‘Refresh every’ and setting your preferred time interval for updating the data.
Web scraping at scale

Although extracting data using Excel can be a great way to scrape html tables from the web, it is nowhere close to a real web scraping solution. This can prove to be useful if you are collecting data for your college research paper or you are a hobbyist looking for a cheap way to get your hands on some data. If data for business is your need, you will definitely have to depend on a web scraping provider with expertise in dealing with web scraping at scale. Outsourcing the complicated process that web scraping will also give you more room to deal with other things that need extra attention such as marketing your business.

Source: https://www.promptcloud.com/blog/how-to-use-excel-to-scrape-websites