What Is Web Scraping?
Terms web scraping is used for different methods to collect information and essential data from across the Internet. It is also termed web data extraction, screen scraping, or web harvesting. There are many ways to do it.
Manually – you access the website and check what you need.Automatic – use the necessary tools to configure what you need and let the tools work for you.
If you choose the automatic way, then you can either install the necessary software by yourself or leverage the cloud-based solution.
Why cloud-based web scraping?
As a developer, you might know that web scraping, HTML scraping, web crawling, and any other web data extraction can be very complicated. To obtain the correct page source, determine the source accurately, render JavaScript, and gather data in a usable form, there is a lot of work to be carried out. You need to know about the software, spend hours on setting up to get the desired data, host yourself, worry about getting blocked (ok if you use IP rotation proxy), etc. Instead, you can use a cloud-based solution to offload all the headaches to the provider, and you can focus on extracting data for your business.
How does it help Business?
You can obtain product feeds, images, prices, and other related details regarding the product from various sites and make your data-warehouse or price comparison site.You can look at the operation of any particular commodity, user behavior, and feedback as per your requirement.In this era of digitalization, businesses are strong about the spent on online reputation management. Thus the web scrapping is requisite here as well.It has turned into a common practice for individuals to read online opinions and articles for various purposes. Thus it’s crucial to add out the impression spamming.By scraping organic search results, you can instantly find out your SEO competitors for a specific search term. You can figure out the title tags and the keywords that others are planning.
Scrapestack
Scrape anything you like on the Internet with Scrapestack. With more than 35 million IPs, you will never have to worry about requests getting blocked when extracting web pages. When you make a REST-API call, requests get sent through more than 100 global locations (depending on the plan) through reliable and scalable infrastructure. You can get it started for FREE for ~10,000 requests with limited support. Once you are satisfied, you can go for a paid plan. Scrapestack is enterprise-ready, and some of the features are as below.
JavaScript renderingHTTPS encryptionPremium proxiesConcurrent requestsNo CAPTCHA
With the help of their good API documentation, you can get it started in five minutes with the code examples for PHP, Python, Nodejs, jQuery, Go, Ruby, etc.
Bright Data
Bright Data brings you World’s #1 Web Data Platform. It allows you to retrieve public web data that you care about. It provides two cloud-based Web Scraping solutions:
Web Unlocker
Web Unlocker is the automated website unlocking tool that reaches targeted websites at unpredicted success rates. It gives you the most accurate web data available with powerful unlocking technology with your one request. Web Unlocker manages browser fingerprints, is compatible with existing codes, gives an automatic IP selection option, and allows for cookie management and IP Priming. You can also validate the content integrity automatically based on data types, response content, request timing, and more. Its pricing is $300/month. You can also go with a pay-as-you-go plan at $5/CPM.
Data Collector
Collecting web data is tedious as it requires sudden adjustments to the innovative blocking methods and site changes. But Data Collector makes it simpler for you as it adapts immediately and allows you to choose a specific format to receive accurate data of any website at any scale. Moreover, Data Collector runs an advanced algorithm based on the practical knowledge specific to the industry in order to match, synthesize, process, structure, and clean the unstructured data seamlessly before delivery. Go with a pay-as-you-go plan at $5/CPM or choose a monthly subscription plan at $350/month for 100K page loads.
ScraperAPI
You get 1000 free API calls with ScraperAPI, which can handle proxies, browsers, and CAPTCHAs like a pro. It handles over 5 billion API requests every month for over 1,500 businesses, and I believe one of the many reasons for that is because their scraper never gets blocked while harvesting the web. It utilizes millions of proxies to rotate the IP addresses and even retrieves failed requests. It’s easy to get started; it’s fast and, interestingly, very customizable as well. You can render Javascript to customize request headers, request type, IP geolocation, and more. There’s also a 99.9% uptime guarantee, and you get unlimited bandwidth. Get 10% OFF with promo code – GF10
Abstract API
Abstract is an API powerhouse, and you wouldn’t be left unconvinced after using its Web Scraping API. This made-for-developer product is quick and highly customizable. You can choose from 100+ global servers to make the scraping API requests without caring for downtime. Besides, its millions of constantly rotated IPs & proxies ensure a smooth data extraction at scale. And you can rest assured that your data is safe with 256-bit SSL encryption. Finally, you can try Abstract Web Scraping API for free with a 1000 API requests plan and move to paid subscriptions as per the need.
Oxylabs
Oxylabs web scraping API is one of the easiest tools to extract data from simple to complex websites including eCommerce. Data retrieval is fast and accurate because of its unique built-in proxy rotator and JavaScript rendering, and you only pay for the results that are successfully delivered. Regardless of where you are, the Web Scraper API gives you access to data from 195 different countries. Running a scraper requires maintaining an infrastructure that requires periodic maintenance; Oxylabs offers a maintenance-free infrastructure, so you no longer have to worry about IP bans or other problems. Your scrapping efforts will be successful more often since it can automatically retry for failed scraping attempts. Top Features
Huge 102M+ proxy pool.Bulk scraping up to 1000 URLs.Automate routine scraping activities.Can retrieve scrapping results to AWS S3 or GCS
Oxylabs scraping is free to try for a week, and starter plans start at $99 monthly.
ScrapingBee
ScrapingBee is another amazing service that rotates proxies for you and can handle headless browsers while also not getting blocked. It’s very much customizable using JavaScript snippets and overall can be used for SEO purposes, growth hacking, or simply general scraping. It’s used by some of the most prominent companies, such as WooCommerce, Zapier, and Kayak. You can get started for free before upgrading to a paid plan, starting at just $29/month.
Apify
Apify got a lot of modules called actor to do data processing, turn webpage to API, data transformation, crawl sites, run headless chrome, etc. It is the largest source of information ever created by humankind. Some of the readymade actors can help you to get it started quickly to do the following. and a lot more to build the product and services for your business.
Web Scraper
Web Scraper, a must-use tool, is an online platform where you can deploy scrapers built and analyzed using the free point-and-click chrome extension. Using the extension, you make “sitemaps” that determine how the data should be passed through and extracted. You can write the data quickly in CouchDB or download it as a CSV file. Features
You can get started immediately as the tool is as simple as it gets and involves excellent tutorial videos.Supports heavy javascript websitesIts extension is opensource, so you will not be sealed in with the vendor if the office shuts downSupports external proxies or IP rotation
Mozenda
Mozenda is especially for businesses that are searching for a cloud-based self-serve webpage scraping platform that needs to seek no further. You will be surprised to know that with over 7 billion pages scraped, Mozenda has the sense of serving business customers from all around the province. Features
Templating to build the workflow fasterCreate job sequences to automate the flowScrape region-specific dataBlock unwanted domain requests
Octoparse
You will love Octoparse services. This service provides a cloud-based platform for users to drive their extraction tasks built with the Octoparse Desktop App. Features
Point and click tool is transparent to set up and useSupports Javascript-heavy websitesIt can run up to 10 scrapers in the local computer if you don’t require much scalabilityIncludes automatic IP rotation in every plan
ParseHub
ParseHub helps you develop web scrapers to crawl single and various websites with the assistance for JavaScript, AJAX, cookies, sessions, and switches using their desktop application and deploy them to their cloud service. Parsehub provides a free version where you have 200 pages of statistics in 40 minutes, five community projects, and limited support.
Diffbot
Diffbot lets you configure crawlers that can work in and index websites and then deal with them using its automatic APIs for certain data extraction from different web content. You can further create a custom extractor if specific data extraction API doesn’t work for the sites you need. Diffbot knowledge graph lets you query the web for rich data.
Zyte
Zyte has an AI-powered automated extraction tool that lets you get the data in a structured format within seconds. It supports 40+ languages and scrapes data from all over the world. It has an automatic IP rotation mechanism built in so that your IP address does not get banned.
Conclusion
It is quite remarkable to know that there is almost no data that you can’t get through extracting web data using these web scrapers. Go and build your product with the extracted data.
