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Why Content Aggregation Tools Are Important to Every Website

fooooo-png — Sun, 27 Sep 2020 09:07:41 +0000

Table of Contents

Why content aggregation tools important
The difference between aggregation and plagiarism
What is a content aggregation tool
Content sources and content aggregation tools
Conclusion

On average, Google processes over 40,000 search queries per second. High ranking content is a powerful engine of attracting traffic, increasing retention rate, and conversion for a website. However, for most websites, it is not an easy task to produce high-quality content regularly due to different kinds of limits.

Why Content Aggregation Tools Important

This is why content aggregation tools have become very important to every website these days. With a content aggregation tool, you can gather a lot of content in one day without putting too much manpower on it.

If you haven’t used any content aggregation tool or do not know the benefits of it, think about these questions:

Without high-quality updates, how can people find your website using Google? If you’re not sharing new or trending content on your website or social media, why will people follow your page? If you’re not providing useful content to help your target audience to solve their problem, why will they buy from you?

The difference between content aggregation and content plagiarism

A lot of people may think that using content aggregation tools to gather content for their websites is a kind of content plagiarism. While, don’t rush a conclusion. Content aggregation is a process of compiling information on any topic for one or more related keywords and publishing them on your websites, platforms, social media pages or blogs. While content plagiarism is an act of taking someone’s work, claiming it to be yours.

Publishing the content (citing the source when necessary) you gather with a content aggregation tool won’t take away the credits of the original writers. Click this content aggregation site to test away. You’ll know how content aggregation can benefit both the platform users and original writers. The concept behind content aggregation is to provide users with rich information that would have been hard to find.

What is a content aggregation tool?

A content aggregation tool is an application or website that can help you collect content from a wide range of platforms and then republish all the content into one place. There are many types of content aggregation tools specializing in collecting different kinds of content(sports news, finance news, and game news, etc.) or content formats (video, blogs, podcasts, pictures, and so on.).

It is obvious that you can’t use one content aggregation tool to fit all your content needs. Selecting your content aggregation toolkit depends on which sources you plan to pull content from and whether the tool supports those platforms. We will cover more information on different types of aggregators and content sources in the upcoming session.

Content Sources and Content Aggregation Tools

There are many sources of high-quality content and content aggregation tools in the market to help you with content curation and aggregation on your website. We’ve picked five top-rated recommendations for your aggregation project.

1. Octoparse

Octoparse is a unique type of content aggregation tool. It’s a free web crawler. Instead of providing content, it helps people who have a need for massive content sources to collect content from any websites.

You can use it to scrape a great deal of content from Reddit, Medium, The New Yorker, just to name a few. Then you can upload the scraped content to your CMS as your content repository for use when you need new content. Besides, it can also help you gather information from social media to help you monitor trending topics and people’s interests.

2. Google News

Google News is one of the easiest sources to set up as a content aggregation tool to collect feed around a specific topic. It “presents a continuous, customizable flow of articles organized from thousands of publishers and magazines.” To use Google News as your content aggregation tool, you need an API to connect your CMS to Google News.

3. Netvibes

Netvibes is a dashboard of everything, delivering social media and brand monitoring, news aggregation, drag-and-drop analytics and data visualization—all in one easy-to-use and fully customizable platform. Netvibes’ personalized dashboards enable users to listen, learn and act on everything that matters to them online.

4. Digg

Digg is a social network and news aggregating site, aiming to select stories specifically for the Internet audience such as science, trending political issues, and viral Internet issues. This website is great for content inspiration.

If you can’t find anything interesting to write, take a moment to read some of its articles. It will inspire you. It doesn’t support API connection at the moment. If you want content from them, you need to take some time to contact time for content citing permission.

5. Castbox

Castbox is a rich podcast database and is also a great source for content aggregation you can’t miss. It offers access to over 95 million audio content including podcasts, audiobooks, FM radio and more in 27 different countries on your devices.

You can use it to discover popular podcasts on various topics including News, Music, Business, Games, etc. If you’re searching for podcast sources for your target audience, Castbox is definitely a good choice.

Conclusion

To evaluate a content aggregation tool is to see whether it can gather the information you need intelligently and effortlessly. You may already have your own sources to get the wanted content or you may try above. The key is to choose the right content aggregation tool and Octoparse, specialized in web scraping, could be the surprise for you.

3 Most Practical Uses of eCommerce Data Scraping Tools

fooooo-png — Mon, 21 Sep 2020 08:50:10 +0000

Table of Contents

*3 Practical Uses of Ecommerce Data
*3 popular eCommerce data scraping tools
*Conclusion

In today’s eCommerce world, eCommerce data scraping tools gain great popularity all over the world as the competition among eCommerce business owners gets more fierce year by year. Data scraping tools become the new technique and tool to help them improve their performance.

A lot of store owners find using an eCommerce data scraping tool to monitor competitors’ activities and customers’ behaviors can help them maintain their competitiveness and improve sales. If you have no idea how to make full use of eCommerce data scraping tools, stay with me and we will look into 3 most practical uses of a scraping tool and how the tool helps grow your business.

Three Practical Uses of Ecommerce Data

1) Price Monitoring

Price is one of the most critical aspects that affect customers’ buying interest. 87% of online shoppers indicate that price is the most important factor that affects buying behaviors, followed by shipping cost and speed. That research suggests that a potential customer won’t hesitate to leave your store if your price doesn’t match his expectation.

In addition, according to a study from AYTM, 78 percent of shoppers compare prices between two or more brands, then opt for the lowest price. With easy access to many free online price comparison tools, online shoppers can easily see the price of a specific item across dozens of brands and marketplaces.

It is necessary for online business owners to have an eCommerce data scraping tool to scrape price information from competitors’ web pages or from price comparison Apps. If not, it’s likely that you will have trouble attracting new customers to your store or maintaining your current customer base, because you don’t know when and how to adjust your price to cater to those price-sensitive customers.

2) Competitor Analysis

We’re aware that improving the shipping service is another solution to increase sales. 56% of online sellers offer free shipping (and easy returns) regardless of the purchase price or the product type.

Lots of online sellers use free shipping as a marketing strategy to nudge people to buy from them or even buy more from them. For example, it’s quite common that customers are more willing to spend $100 on a product with free shipping rather than buy a $90 product that takes $10 for the shipping. Besides, it’s common for customers to buy more items in order to get a free shipping offer.

You can use an eCommerce data scraping tool to find out how many of your competitors are offering a free shipping service. Using a data scraping tool, you can easily scrape and collect the data in real-time. In this case, if they don’t provide a free shipping service, you can attract their customers by offering it.

3) Customer Sentiment Analysis

Knowing how your competitors’ audiences feel about the products or brands can help you evaluate your marketing strategy and customer experience management. ECommerce data scraping tools can help you gather such information.

The voices of customers that you gather from your competitors will help you understand what customers value and how you can better serve them. Their voices are mostly scattered among comments and conversation under your competitors’ stores and posts and interactions on their social media. With such information at hand, you will know what customers want from the product – what they like or dislike.

To outcompete your competitors, it is necessary for you to gain all this information, look into it, and draw conclusions. Therefore you can adjust your marketing strategy or your products/services accordingly.

Now you are probably wondering what scraping tools can be used for these purposes. Here, I would like to share with you this shortlist of the most popular eCommerce data scraping tools. You should try them out!

3 popular eCommerce data scraping tools

1) Octoparse

Octoparse is a free and powerful eCommerce data scraping tool with a user-friendly point-and-click interface. Both Windows and Mac users will find it easy-to-use for extracting almost all kinds of data you need from a website. With its brand new auto-detect algorithm, users with/without coding knowledge are able to extract tons of data within seconds.

Pros: Octoparse provides over 50 pre-built templates for all users, covering big websites such as Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Walmart, etc. All you need to do is to enter the keywords and URL, then wait for the data result. In addition, it provides a free version for all people. For premium users, they can use features such as crawler scheduling and cloud extraction to make the process less time-consuming.

Cons: Octoparse cannot scrape data from PDF files. It can’t download files automatically, while it allows you to extract the URLs of images, PDFs and other types of files. You can use automatic download software to down these files in bulk with the URL scraped by Octoparse.

2) Parsehub

ParseHub works with single-page apps, multi-page apps and other modern web technology. ParseHub can handle Javascript, AJAX, cookies, sessions, and redirects. You can easily fill in forms, loop through dropdowns, login to websites, click on interactive maps and deal with websites that apply infinite scrolling techniques.

Pros: Parsehub supports both Windows and Mac OS systems. It provides a free version for people with eCommerce data scraping needs.

Cons: The free version is quite limited with only 5 projects and 200 pages per run. It didn’t support documentation extraction. And some advanced functions are tricky to use sometimes.

3) 80legs

80legs is a web data extraction tool that allows users to create and run web crawlers through its software as a service platform. It’s built on top of a distributed grid computing network. This grid consists of approximately 50,000 individual computers distributed across the world and uses bandwidth monitoring technology to prevent bandwidth cap overages.

Pros: 80legs is more suitable for small companies and individuals. It offers unique service plans so that customers pay only for what they crawl.

Cons: 80legs is not able to help to get a huge amount of data, you must choose between custom set crawled data, pre-built API, and crawl application to be developed.

Conclusion

Once you know how to use eCommerce data scraping tools to help you get the needed data, what insights you can gain from the data is another story. Try to do some data analysis and find ways to visualize the data. Put your data into use.

You can try the simple analysis methods mentioned in this article to get to know your users through data analysis.

3 Ways to Scrape Financial Data WITHOUT Python

fooooo-png — Mon, 14 Sep 2020 07:40:08 +0000

The financial market is a place of risks and instability. It’s hard to predict how the curve will go and sometimes, for investors, one decision could be a make-or-break move. That’s why experienced practitioners never lose track of financial data.

We human beings are wired to see in the short term. Unless we have a database with data in a well structure, we are not able to get a handle on voluminous information. Data scraping is the solution that gets complete data at your fingertip.

Table of Contents

What We Are Scraping When We Scrape Financial Data?
Why Scrape Financial Data?
How to Scrape Financial Data without Python

Let’s get started!

What We Are Scraping When We Scrape Financial Data?

When it comes to scraping financial data, stock market data is in the spotlight of attention. But there’s more, trading prices and changes of securities, mutual funds, futures, cryptocurrencies, etc. Financial statements, press releases, and other business-related news are also sources of financial data that people will scrape.

Why Scrape Financial Data?

Financial data, when extracted and analyzed in real-time, can provide wealthy information for investments and trading. And people in different positions scrape financial data for varied purposes.

**Stock market prediction
Stock trading organizations leverage data from online trading portals like Yahoo Finance to keep records of stock prices. This financial data help companies to predict the market trends and buy/sell stocks for the highest profits. Same for trades in futures, currencies, and other financial products. With complete data at hand, cross-comparison becomes easier and a bigger picture manifests.

**Equity research
“Don’t put all the eggs in one basket.” Portfolio managers do equity research to predict the performance of multiple stocks. Data is used to identify the pattern of their changes and further develop an algorithmic trading model. Before getting to this end, a vast amount of financial data will involve in the quantitative analysis.

**Sentiment analysis of the financial market
Scraping financial data is not merely about numbers. Things can go qualitatively. We may find that the presupposition raised by Adam Smith is untenable - people are not always economic, or say, rational. Behavioral economics reveals that our decisions are susceptible to all kinds of cognitive biases, plainly, emotions.

Using the data from financial news, blogs, relevant social media posts, and reviews, financial organizations can perform sentiment analysis to grab people’s attitudes towards the market, which can be an indicator of the market trend.

How to Scrape Financial Data without Python

If you are a non-coder, stay tuned, let me explain how you can scrape financial data with the help of Octoparse. Yahoo Finance is a nice source to get comprehensive and real-time financial data. I will show you below how to scrape from the site.

Besides, there are lots of financial data sources with up-to-date and valuable information you can scrape from, such as Google Finance, Bloomberg, CNNMoney, Morningstar, TMXMoney, etc. All these sites are HTML codes in nature, which means that all the tables, news articles, and other texts/URLs can be extracted in bulk by a web scraping tool.

To know more about what web scraping is and what it is used for, you can check out this article.

Let’s get started!

There are 3 ways to get the data:

Use a web scraping template

Build your web crawlers

Turn to data scraping services

**1. Use a Yahoo Finance web scraping template
In order to help newbies get an easy start on web scraping, Octoparse offers an array of web scraping templates. These templates are preformatted crawlers ready-to-use. Users can pick one of them to pull data from respective pages instantly.

The Yahoo Finance template offered by Octoparse is designed to scrape the Cryptocurrency data. No more configuration is required. Simply click “try it” and you will get the table data in minutes.

**2. Build a crawler from scratch in 2 steps
In addition to Cryptocurrency data, you can also build a crawler from scratch in 2 steps to scrape world indices from Yahoo Finance. A customized crawler is highly flexible in terms of data extraction. This method is also workable to scrape other pages from Yahoo Finance.

Step 1: Enter the web address to build a crawler
The bot will load the website in the built-in browser, and a one-click on the Tips Panel can trigger the auto-detection process and get the table data fields done.

Step 2: Execute the crawler to get data
When your desired data are all highlighted in red, save the settings, and run the crawler. As you can see in the pop-up, all the data are scraped down successfully. Now, you can export the data into Excel, JSON, CSV, or your database via APIs.

**3. Financial data scraping services
If you are scraping financial data from time to time in a rather small amount, help yourself with handy web scraping tools. You may find joy in building your own crawlers. However, if you are in need of voluminous data for a profound analysis, say millions of records, and have a high standard of accuracy, it is better to hand your scraping needs to a group of reliable web scraping professionals.

** Why data scraping services deserve? **

Time and energy-saving
The only thing you would bother is to convey clearly to the data service provider what data you want. Once this is done, the data service team will deal with the rest of all, no hassle. You can plunge into your core business and do what you good at. Let professionals get the scraping job done for you.
Zero learning curve & tech issues
Even the easiest scraping tool takes time to master. The ever-changing environment on different websites may be hard to deal with. And when you are scraping on a large scale, you may encounter issues such as IP ban, low speed, duplicate data, etc. Data scraping services can free you from these troubles.
No legal violations
If you are not paying enough attention to the terms of service of the data sources you are scraping from, you may get yourself into trouble. With the support of experienced legal counsel, a professional web scraping service provider works in accordance with laws and the whole scraping process will be implemented in a legitimate manner.

Cryptocurrency Market Analysis with Web Scraping

Scrape information from Yahoo Finance

Scrape Stock Info from Bloomberg

Video: Web Scraping | Cryptocurrency Market

Author: Milly

Edited by Cici

Web Data Extraction: The Definitive Guide 2020

fooooo-png — Mon, 07 Sep 2020 09:44:23 +0000

Web data extraction is gaining popularity as one of the great ways to collect useful data to fuel the business cost-effectively. Although web data extraction has existed for quite some time, it has never been as heavily used, or as reliable as it is today. This guide aims to help web scraping beginners to get a general idea of web data extraction.

Part 1：Table of Contents

Part 2：What is web data extraction

Part 3：Benefits of web data extraction

E-commerce price monitoring
Marketing analysis
Lead generation

Part 4：Web data extraction for non-programmers

Octoparse
Cyotek WebCopy
Getleft
OutWit Hub
WebHarvy

Part 5：Legal aspects of web data extraction

Part 6：Conclusions

Part 1：What is web data extraction

Web data extraction is a practice of massive data copying done by bots. It has many names, depending on how people would like to call it, web scraping, data scraping, web crawling, to name a few. The data extracted(copied) from the internet can be saved to a file in your computer, or database.

Part 2：Benefits of web data extraction

Businesses can get a load of benefits from web data extraction. It can be used more widely than you expect, but it would suffice to point out how it is used in a few areas.

1 E-commerce price monitoring

The importance of price monitoring speaks for itself, especially when you sell items on an online marketplace such as Amazon, eBay, Lazada, etc. These platforms are transparent, that is, buyers, also any one of your competitors, have easy access to prices, inventory, reviews, and all kinds of information for each store. which means you can’t just focus on the price but also need to keep an eye on other aspects of your competitors. Hence in addition to prices, there are more available for you to dig into. Price monitoring may be more than prices.

Most retailers and e-commerce vendors try to put as much information about their products online as possible. This is helpful for buyers to evaluate, but also is too much exposure for the store owners because, with such information, competitors can get a glimpse of how you run your business. Fortunately, you can use these data to do the same thing.

You should gather information such as price, inventory levels, discounts, product turnover, new items added, new locations added, product category ASP, etc, from your competitors as well. With these data at hand, you can fuel your business with below benefits rendered by web data extraction.

Increase margins and sales by adjusting prices at the right time on the right channels.
Maintain or improve your competitiveness in the marketplace.
Improve your cost management by using competitor prices as a negotiating ground with suppliers, or review your own overheads and production cost.
Come up with effective pricing strategies, especially during promotion such as season-end sales or holiday seasons.

2 Marketing Analysis

Almost everyone can start their own business as long as they go online thanks to the easy entry brought by the magic Internet. Businesses increasingly sprout on the Internet signifies that competition among retailers will be more fierce. To make your business stand out and to maintain sustainable growth, you can do more than just lower your price or launch advertising campaigns. They could be productive for a business in an initial stage, while in the long run, you should keep an eye on what other players are doing and condition your strategies to the ever-changing environment.

You can study your customers and your competitors by scraping product prices, customer behaviors, product reviews, events, stock levels, and demands, etc. With this information, you’ll gain insights on how to improve your service and products and how to stand out among your competitors. Web data extraction tools can streamline this process, providing you with always up-to-date information for marketing analysis.

Get a better understanding of your customers’ demands and behaviors, and then find some specific customers’ needs to make exclusive offerings.

Analyze customer reviews and feedback for products and services of your competitors to make improvements to your own product.
Make a predictive analysis to help foresee future trends, plan future strategies, and timely optimize your prioritization.
Study your competitors’ copies and product images to find out the most suitable ways to differentiate yourself.

3 Lead generation

There is no doubt that being capable of generating more leads is one of the significant skills to grow your business. How to generate leads effectively? A lot of people talk about it but few of them know how to make it. Most salespeople, however, are still looking for leads on the Internet in a traditional, manual way. What a typical example of wasting time on trivia.

Nowadays, smart salespeople will search for leads with the help of web scraping tools, running through social media, online directories, websites, forums, etc, so as to save more time to work on their promising clients. Just leave this meaningless and boring lead copying work to your crawlers.

When you use a web crawler, don’t forget to collect the information below for lead analysis. After all, not every lead is worth spending time on. You need to prioritize the prospects who are ready or willing to buy from you.

Personal information: Name, age, education, phone number, job position, email
Company information: Industry, size, website, location, profitability
As time passes by, you’ll collect a lot of leads, even enough to build your own CRM. Having a database of email addresses of your target audience, you can send out information, newsletters, invitations for an event or advertisement campaigns in bulk. But beware of being too spammy!

Part 4：How does web data extraction work?

After knowing what you can benefit from a web data extraction tool, you may want to build one on your own to harvest the fruits of this technique. It’s important to first understand how a crawler works and what web pages are built on before starting your journey of web data extraction.

Build a crawler with programming languages and then enter the URL of a website that you want to scrape from. It sends an HTTP request to the URL of the webpage. If the site grants you access, it responds to your request by returning the content of webpages.
Parse the webpage is only half of the web scraping. The scraper inspects the page and interprets a tree structure of the HTML. The tree structure works as a navigator will help the crawler follow the paths through the web structure to get the data.
After that, the web data extraction tool extracts the data fields you require to scrape and store it. Lastly, when the extraction is finished, choose a format, and export the data scraped.

The process of web scraping is easy to understand, but it’s definitely not easy to build one from scratch for non-technical people. Luckily, there are many free web data extraction tools out there thanks to the development of big data. Stay tuned, there are some nice and free scrapers I would love to recommend to you.

Web data extraction for non-programmers

Here are 5 popular web data extraction tools rated by many non-technical users. If you’re new to the web data extraction, you should give it a try.

Octoparse
Octoparse is a powerful website data extraction tool Its user-friendly point-and-click interface can guide you through the entire extraction process effortlessly. What's more, the auto-detection process and ready-to-use templates make scraping much easier for new starters.

Cyotek WebCopy
It is self-evident that WebCopy serves as a data extraction tool for websites. It is a free tool for copying full or partial websites locally onto your hard disk for offline reach. WebCopy will scan the specified website and download its content onto your hard disk. Links to resources such as style-sheets, images, and other pages on the website will automatically be remapped to match the local path. Using its extensive configuration you can define which parts of a website will be copied and how.

Getleft
Getleft is a Web-site data extraction tool. You can give it a URL, it will download a complete site according to the options specified by the user. It also changes the original pages and all the links to relative links so you can surf on your hard disk.

OutWit Hub
OutWit Hub is a Web data extraction software application designed to automatically extract information from online or local resources. It recognizes and grabs links, images, documents, contacts, recurring vocabulary and phrases, RSS feeds and converts structured and unstructured data into formatted tables which can be exported to spreadsheets or databases.

WebHarvy
WebHarvy is a point-and-click web data extraction software. It helps users easily extract data from websites to their computers. No programming/scripting knowledge is required.

Part 4：Legal aspects of web data extraction

Is it legal to use a web data extraction tool? The answer depends on how you plan to use the data and whether you follow the terms of use of the website. In other words, use it within the laws.

There are a few common examples of legal and illegal activities using web scraping tools.

Things you’re allowed to do:

Use automated tools like web data extraction tools.
Get access to websites like social media, e-commerce platforms, and directories to gather information.
Re-publish gathered public information.

Things you’re not allowed to do:

Induce harm to third-party web users (eg. posting spam comments)
Induce harm to a target site functionality (eg. throttle bandwidth)
Criminal activity (eg. reselling or republishing proprietary information property)
Tortious conduct (eg. using that extracted info in a misleading or harmful way)

In addition, users of web data extraction tools or techniques mustn’t violate the terms of use, laws of regulations, and the copyright statements of the websites. The website will state clearly what kind of data can be used and how you can access it. You can find this information easily on its home page.

Part 5：Conclusion

By now, you’ve known how powerful web data extraction can be, how it works, and where you can find web data extraction tools for non-programmers. The next thing you should do is to download a tool or write a crawler to start your web crawling journey.

Regardless of what tools or techniques you are going to use to extract web data, they serve to the same end: Get helpful data to fuel your business.

3 Ways to Scrape Financial Data WITHOUT Python

fooooo-png — Mon, 31 Aug 2020 10:44:19 +0000

A financial market is a place of risks and instability. It’s hard to predict how the curve will go and sometimes, for investors, one decision could be a make-or-break move. That’s why experienced practitioners never lose track of financial data.

We human beings are wired to see in the short term. Unless we have a database with data in a good structure, we are not able to get a handle on voluminous information. Data scraping is the solution that gets complete data at your fingertip.

Table of Contents
What We Are Scraping When We Scrape Financial Data?
Why Scrape Financial Data?
How to Scrape Financial Data without Python
Let’s get started!

What We Are Scraping When We Scrape Financial Data?

Why Scrape Financial Data?

Financial data, when extracted and analyzed in real-time, can provide wealthy information for investments and trading. And people in different positions scrape financial data for varied purposes.

Stock market prediction
Stock trading organizations leverage data from online trading portals like Yahoo Finance to keep records of stock prices. This financial data help companies to predict the market trends and buy/sell stocks for the highest profits. Same for trades in futures, currencies, and other financial products. With complete data at hand, cross-comparison becomes easier and a bigger picture manifests.

Equity research
“Don’t put all the eggs in one basket.” Portfolio managers do equity research to predict the performance of multiple stocks. Data is used to identify the pattern of their changes and further develop an algorithmic trading model. Before getting to this end, a vast amount of financial data will involve in the quantitative analysis.

Sentiment analysis of the financial market
Scraping financial data is not merely about numbers. Things can go qualitatively. We may find that the presupposition raised by Adam Smith is untenable - people are not always economic, or say, rational. Behavioral economics reveals that our decisions are susceptible to all kinds of cognitive biases, plainly, emotions.

How to Scrape Financial Data without Python

To know more about what web scraping is and what it is used for, you can check out this article.

Let’s get started!

There are 3 ways to get the data:

template Use a web scraping template
crawler Build your web crawlers
service Turn to data scraping services

1. Use a Yahoo Finance web scraping template
In order to help newbies get an easy start on web scraping, Octoparse offers an array of web scraping templates. These templates are preformatted crawlers ready-to-use. Users can pick one of them to pull data from respective pages instantly.

The Yahoo Finance template offered by Octoparse is designed to scrape the Cryptocurrency data. No more configuration is required. Simply click “try it” and you will get the table data in minutes.

2. Build a crawler from scratch in 2 steps
In addition to Cryptocurrency data, you can also build a crawler from scratch in 2 steps to scrape world indices from Yahoo Finance. A customized crawler is highly flexible in terms of data extraction. This method is also workable to scrape other pages from Yahoo Finance.

Step 1: Enter the web address to build a crawler

The bot will load the website in the built-in browser, and a one-click on the Tips Panel can trigger the auto-detection process and get the table data fields done.

Step 2: Execute the crawler to get data

When your desired data are all highlighted in red, save the settings, and run the crawler. As you can see in the pop-up, all the data are scraped down successfully. Now, you can export the data into Excel, JSON, CSV, or to your database via APIs.

3. Financial data scraping services
If you are scraping financial data from time to time in a rather small amount, help yourself with handy web scraping tools. You may find joy in building your own crawlers. However, if you are in need of voluminous data for a profound analysis, say millions of records, and have a high standard of accuracy, it is better to hand your scraping needs to a group of reliable web scraping professionals.

Why data scraping services deserve?

1.Time and energy-saving
The only thing you would bother is to convey clearly to the data service provider what data you want. Once this is done, the data service team will deal with the rest of all, no hassle. You can plunge into your core business and do what you good at. Let professionals get the scraping job done for you.

2.Zero learning curve & tech issues
Even the easiest scraping tool takes time to master. The ever-changing environment in different websites may be hard to deal with. And when you are scraping on a large scale, you may encounter issues such as IP ban, low speed, duplicate data, etc. Data scraping services can free you from these troubles.

3.No legal violations
If you are not paying enough attention to the terms of service of the data sources you are scraping from, you may get yourself into trouble. With the support of experienced legal counsel, a professional web scraping service provider works in accordance with laws and the whole scraping process will be implemented in a legitimate manner.

7 Web Scraping Limitations You Should Know

fooooo-png — Mon, 24 Aug 2020 03:33:28 +0000

Web scraping surely brings advantages to us. It is speedy, cost-effective, and can collect data from websites with an accuracy of over 90%. It frees you from endless copy-and-paste into messy layout documents. However, something may be overlooked. There are some limitations and even risks lurking behind web scraping.

Click to read:
· What is web scraping and what is it used for?
· Which is the best way to scrape web data?
· What are the limitations of web scraping tools?
· Closing thoughts

· What is web scraping and what is it used for?

For those who are not familiar with web scraping, let me explain. Web scraping is a technique used to extract information from websites at a rapid speed. The data scraped down and saved to the local will be accessible anytime. It works as one of the first steps in data analysis, data visualization and data mining as it collects data from many sources. Getting data prepared is the prerequisite for further visualization or analysis. That’s obvious. How can we start web scraping?

· Which is the best way to scrape web data?

There are some common techniques to scrape data from web pages, which all come with some limitations. You can either build your own crawler using programming languages, outsource your web scraping projects, or use a web scraping tool. Without a specific context, there is no such thing as “the best way to scrape”. Think of your basic knowledge of coding, how much time is disposable and your financial budget, you will have your own pick.

For example, if you are an experienced coder and you are confident with your coding skills, you can definitely scrape data by yourself. But since each website needs a crawler, you will have to build a bunch of crawlers for different sites. This can be time-consuming. And you should be equipped with sufficient programming knowledge for crawlers’ maintenance. Think about that.

If you own a company with a big budget craving for accurate data, the story would be different. Forget about programming, just hire a group of engineers or outsource your project to professionals.

Speaking of outsourcing, you may find some online freelancers offering these data collection services. The unit price looks quite affordable. However, if you calculate carefully with the number of sites and loads of items you are planning to get, the amount may grow exponentially. Statistics shows that to scrape 6000 products’ information from Amazon, the quotes from web scraping companies average around $250 for the initial setup and $177 for monthly maintenance.

If you are a small business owner, or simply a non-coder in need of data, the best choice is to choose a proper scraping tool that suits your needs. As a quick reference, you can check out this list of the top 30 web scraping software.

Limitations of web scraping

· What are the limitations of web scraping tools?
*1. Learning curve *
Even the easiest scraping tool takes time to master. Some tools, like Apify, still require coding knowledge to use. Some non-coder friendly tools may take people weeks to learn. To scrape websites successfully, knowledge about XPath, HTML, AJAX is necessary. So far, the easiest way to scrape websites is to use prebuilt web scraping templates to extract data within clicks.

2. The structure of websites change frequently
Scraped data is arranged according to the structure of the website. Sometimes you revisit a site and will find the layout changed. Some designers constantly update the websites for better UI, some may for the sake of anti-scraping. The change could be as small as a position change of a button, or a drastic change of overall page layout. Even a minor change can mess up your data. As the scrapers are built according to the old site, you have to adjust your crawlers every few weeks to get correct data.

3. It is not easy to handle complex websites
Here comes another tricky technical challenge. If you look at web scraping in general, 50% of websites are easy to scrape, 30% are moderate, and the last 20% are rather tough to scrape from. Some scraping tools are designed to pull data from simple websites that apply numbered navigation. Yet nowadays, more websites are starting to include dynamic elements such as AJAX. Big sites like Twitter apply infinite scrolling, and some websites need users to click on the “load more” button to keep loading the content. In this case, users require a more functional scraping tool.

4. To extract data on a large scale is way harder
Some tools are not able to extract millions of records, as they can only handle a small-scale scraping. This gives headaches to eCommerce business owners who need millions of lines of regular data feeds straight into their database. Cloud-based scrapers like Octoparse and Web Scraper perform well in terms of large scale data extraction. Tasks run on multiple cloud servers. You get rapid speed and gigantic space for data retention.

5. A web scraping tool is not omnipotent
What kinds of data can be extracted? Mainly texts and URLs.

Advanced tools can extract texts from source code (inner & outer HTML) and use regular expressions to reformat it. For images, one can only scrape their URLs and convert the URLs into images later. If you are curious about how to scrape image URLs and bulk download them, you can have a look at How to Build an Image Crawler Without Coding.

What’s more, it is important to note that most web scrapers are not able to crawl PDFs, as they parse through HTML elements to extract the data. To scrape data from PDFs, you need other tools like Smallpdf and PDFelements.

6. Your IP may get banned by the target website

Captcha annoys. Does it ever happen to you that you need to get past a captcha when scraping from a website? Be careful, that could be a sign of IP detection. Scraping a website extensively brings heavy traffic, which may overload a web server and cause economic loss to the site owner. To prevent getting blocked, there are many tricks. For example, you can set up your tool to simulate the normal browsing behavior of a human.

7. There are even some legal issues involved

Is web scraping legal? A simple “yes” or “no” may not cover the whole issue. Let’s just say… it depends. If you are scraping public data for academic uses, you should be fine. But if you scrape private information from sites clearly stating any automated scraping is disallowed, you may get yourself into trouble. LinkedIn and Facebook are among those who clearly state that “we don’t welcome scrapers here” in their robots.txt file/terms and service (ToS). Mind your acts while scraping.

· Closing thoughts

In a nutshell, there are many limitations in web scraping. If you want data from websites tricky to scrape from, such as Amazon, Facebook, and Instagram, you may turn to a Data-as-a-Service company like Octoparse. This is by far the most convenient method to extract websites that apply strong anti-scraping techniques. A DaaS provider offers customized service according to your needs. By getting your data ready, it relieves you from the stress of building and maintaining your crawlers. No matter which industry you are in, eCommerce, social media, journalism, finance, or consulting, if you are in need of data, feel free to contact us, anytime.

How to Scrape Data from Craigslist

fooooo-png — Tue, 18 Aug 2020 01:53:52 +0000

This article covers:

Why do people scrape Craigslist
Is scraping Craigslist illegal
How to scrape data from Craigslist
Craigslist data scraping with Octoparse
Closing thoughts

Why do people scrape Craigslist?

Craigslist gathers expansive information. Some may not be satisfied just browsing it, they scrape data from Craigslist for a variety of reasons. Below are the typical 4 of them.

1> Individuals can extract first-hand information regarding houses, cars, computers, and many more. When exported into excel sheets, it is much easier for them to look through and compare the data.

2> Craigslist, similar to Yellowpages and Yelp, is full of potential business leads for revenue generation. No doubt that leads is important, especially qualified ones. This is probably the reason why Craigslist appeals to so many people.

3> Gain profits by reselling goods. With scraped data in a good structure, people can better analyze prices and set a new one for reselling. However, reselling is rather in the gray area, thus this might not be a good try. It’s profitable sometimes, but the consequences may not be delightful.

4> Monitor competitors. Craigslist is full of precious information covering an array of industries where people can keep track of their competitors. Being informed of their strategies in real-time will help businesses gain an edge in competition.

Is scraping Craigslist illegal?

As one of the most popular websites out there to scrape, Craigslist has proved to be one of the toughest ones. The reason is simple: unlike websites that provide users with APIs to get data, Craigslist API is not aimed at pulling data off. Quite on the contrary, it is used for posting data on Craigslist.

Just like Facebook and LinkedIn, Craigslist’s terms clearly state that all sorts of robots, spiders, scripts, scrapers, crawlers are prohibited. And they won’t allow people to steal their users’ personal information on the site.

Craigslist has used various technological and legal methods to prevent being scraped for commercial purposes. In fact, in April 2017, Craigslist obtained a $60.5 million judgment against 3 Taps Inc, a company that is accused of scraping real estate listings. A few months later, Craigslist reached another $31 million judgment with Instamotor, claiming that Instamotor’s car listing service was scraped from Craigslist, and they sent unsolicited emails to craigslist users for promotional purposes.

Nevertheless, as said in an article entitled 10 Myths about Web Scraping, it is illegal if you scrape confidential information for profit, but if you scrape public data discreetly for personal use, you should be fine.

How to scrape data from Craigslist?

If you are a coder, you can follow this Python tutorial on scraping East Bay Area Craigslist for apartments. The code in this tutorial can be modified to pull from any region, category, property type, etc. Or you can check out this Scrapy tutorial to learn to crawl Craigslist’s “Architecture & Engineering” jobs in New York and store the data to a CSV file.

But the problem with the above tutorials are obvious: they are way too complicated for non-coders. If you have zero coding experience and want a simple and quick method, here’s a catch - use an automated data scraping tool like Octoparse.

With the power of data scraping, we can extract all the info we want from Craigslist listings within clicks and export them into Excel, CSV, HTML, and/or databases easily. I will walk you through how to extract Craigslist real estate listings within 3 steps.

Craigslist data scraping with Octoparse

In this case, let’s scrape the housing/real estate for sale in Chicago. First thing first, install Octoparse and launch it on your computer.

Step 1: Enter the target Craigslist URL to build a crawler

Enter the listing URL into the box, and Octoparse will start detecting the page data automatically. As you can see, the data to be extracted is highlighted in red, and the preview section below allows you to pre-edit the data fields.

Step 2: Save the extraction setting

After making sure that the data fields are what we want, click “Save settings” and Octoparse will auto-generate a scraping workflow on the left-hand side.

3: Run the extraction to get data

Finally, you only need to save the crawler and hit “Run” to start extraction. The scraping process can be done within 5 minutes.

Closing thoughts:

Please note that even though this article guides you through extracting Craigslist data, you should always respect its Terms of Service and scrape at a moderate frequency.

Data scraping tools can not only scrape all Craigslist listings but also they are used in many scenarios, including Marketing, E-commerce and Retail, Data Science, Equity and Financial Research, Data Journalism, Academic, Risk management, Insurance and many more. You can read about web scraping uses in business in this article: 25 Hacks to Grow Your Business With Web Data Extraction.

Customize News Aggregator with Web Scraping | 2020 Guide

fooooo-png — Tue, 18 Aug 2020 01:43:18 +0000

News and information are overwhelming on the Internet. Just think of how many news feeds are updated in merely one second. What’s more, all those news are scattered across different websites and platforms. Owing to the time limitation, searching and visiting all those news that you’re interested in could be an unrealistic task.

So, what are the solutions for people to gather all the news together without repetitive and tedious browsing drudgery:

Part 1:Customizing your News Aggregator with a web scraping tool (like Octoparse).

If you want to simply browse the information, then using a News Aggregator Application is the easiest and most convenient way. However, if you want to achieve the business value of news accessible on the Internet, then a customized News Aggregator would be the best choice.

This article will dive deeply into News Aggregation, introducing its business value and how to build your own News Aggregator with Octoparse.

Part 1：What is News Aggregation?
Part 2：How does web scraping contribute to News Aggregation？
Part 3：How to create a web scraper to aggregate Financial news？

News Aggregation is a process that helps people to access the assembled news from a variety of sources in one place. Generally speaking, people may be more familiar with some other terms, like news aggregator, news reader, feed readers, RSS reader and so on. Anyway, they all work under the same principle, scraping/extracting/gathering the news and storing/placing them in a handy location, either on your own computer or in the cloud.

Further, we can easily extend News Aggregation to all kinds of Content Aggregation. With a set of content aggregators, we could access our needed information and data anytime we want.

Here are 3 examples listed in the below table:

Part 2：How does web scraping contribute to News Aggregation？

Web scraping is a technique for website data extraction. We can either create a web scraper with tools (like Octoparse), or build it from scratch by computer languages such as Python, R, and JavaScript. That said, web scraping is the core of the News Aggregation.

Ø Collect news information effectively
Ø Export the scraped data to Excel or via API directly
Ø Update to the latest news at a certain frequency

Part 3：How to create a web scraper to aggregate Financial news？

With Octoparse, everyone can create a web scraper to scrape the news sites easily without coding. As long as you finish reading the short guide below, you can do it too!

I’d love to take Yahoo sport as an example to show you how to create a sports news aggregator.

Download Octoparse on your computer.

Go through Octoparse Scraping 101 to get familiar with how it works.

1) Start a task
Open Octoparse on your computer. Enter the URL to the box and click “Start”.

As you click “start”, the built-in browser will pop up in a second. Just wait a moment for the web to load. In the meantime, you can find the Tips Panel below in the corner.

Click the “Auto-detect web page data” option and Octoparse will help you auto-detect the data available on the present page.

2) Go with auto-detection

After finishing the auto-detection process, Octoparse will tell you what data it has detected(selected in red). If that’s what you need, simply click “Create workflow” on the Tips Panel.
If that’s not what you need, you can choose “switch auto-detect results” to scrape other sets of information.

3) Run the task

Now, you can see the workflow has been created automatically with only a few clicks. You can check the settings and do some minor revisions(if necessary) on the workflow bar according to your needs.

However, in most cases, you can simply click “Run the task” to get the data directly.

4) Options of running

There are three options in Octoparse to run the task.

Because of the nature of news, most likely you would love to gather the updated news at intervals of a certain span of time. When you run the task, you could choose the “Schedule task” to set the starting time and the frequency of updating the data as you need.

Through the above steps, you just build your own sports news aggregator in Octoparse!

If you have any problem with creating a news aggregator, please feel free to contact us at support@octoparse.com.
Nowadays, the capacity to seize the value of data is more and more important for career development. Building your own web scraper, you can get customized information as you need. Furthermore, news aggregation with Octoparse gives you a head start as it always keeps abreast of the latest news.

Try Octoparse for FREE to start your News aggregation project!

Author：Erika

Customize News Aggregator with Web Scraping | 2020 Guide

fooooo-png — Tue, 11 Aug 2020 07:35:44 +0000

So, what are the solutions for people to gather all the news together without repetitive and tedious browsing drudgery:

Part 1:Customizing your News Aggregator with a web scraping tool (like Octoparse).

This article will dive deeply into News Aggregation, introducing its business value and how to build your own News Aggregator with Octoparse.

Part 1：What is News Aggregation?
Part 2：How does web scraping contribute to News Aggregation？
Part 3：How to create a web scraper to aggregate Financial news？

Further, we can easily extend News Aggregation to all kinds of Content Aggregation. With a set of content aggregators, we could access our needed information and data anytime we want.

Here are 3 examples listed in the below table:

Part 2：How does web scraping contribute to News Aggregation？

Ø Collect news information effectively
Ø Export the scraped data to Excel or via API directly
Ø Update to the latest news at a certain frequency

Part 3：How to create a web scraper to aggregate Financial news？

With Octoparse, everyone can create a web scraper to scrape the news sites easily without coding. As long as you finish reading the short guide below, you can do it too!

I’d love to take Yahoo sport as an example to show you how to create a sports news aggregator.

Download Octoparse on your computer.

Go through Octoparse Scraping 101 to get familiar with how it works.

1) Start a task
Open Octoparse on your computer. Enter the URL to the box and click “Start”.

As you click “start”, the built-in browser will pop up in a second. Just wait a moment for the web to load. In the meantime, you can find the Tips Panel below in the corner.

Click the “Auto-detect web page data” option and Octoparse will help you auto-detect the data available on the present page.

2) Go with auto-detection

3) Run the task

Now, you can see the workflow has been created automatically with only a few clicks. You can check the settings and do some minor revisions(if necessary) on the workflow bar according to your needs.

However, in most cases, you can simply click “Run the task” to get the data directly.

4) Options of running

There are three options in Octoparse to run the task.

Through the above steps, you just build your own sports news aggregator in Octoparse!

Try Octoparse for FREE to start your News aggregation project!

Author：Erika

Top Visualization Tool in 2020 - Both Free and Paid

fooooo-png — Mon, 03 Aug 2020 04:51:40 +0000

Data visualization helps present your data or information in new ways, making data easier to understand, which can contribute to the understanding of information and the efficiency of making business decisions.

A lot of data visualization tools are available just a few clicks on Google, but the problem is how to choose the one that is most suitable for you. In 2020, we’d better know the following 10 best tools which provide better functions in accessing and presenting data.

1.Visme

Visme is an all-in-one content creation tool that allows you to create dynamic and interactive charts, graphs, and other data visualizations for your audience. From pie charts, bar charts to maps and more, Visme allows you to input your data directly into its graph engine, or import existing Excel and Google spreadsheets into it.

Furthermore, you can create live data visualizations by connecting a publicly published Google Sheet to your chart so that each time you update your spreadsheet, your data visualization follows up instantly.

Users of Visme have access to over 30 different types of charts, graphs, and other data tools, which give them tons of options for visualizing numbers, stats, and figures.

You can get started with a free account with Visme, or upgrade to premium plans starting at $14/month, paid annually.

Visme’s data visualization tools are perfect for use in giving lectures, compiling reports, building a dynamic analytics dashboard, or delivering a presentation to your team.

2.Datawrapper

Datawrapper is a web-based tool to create charts, maps, and tables that you can embed online or export as PNG, PDF, or SVG. It’s used by thousands of people every day working for brands like The New York Times, Quartz, Fortune Magazine, Süddeutsche Zeitung, or SPIEGEL ONLINE.

The two big advantages of Datawrapper are the concise interface and the great on-brand design of the visualizations. Let’s look at both:

Datawrapper is easy to use even if you’ve never created a chart or map before. As a web tool, Datawrapper requires no installation. You don’t need to be a coder to use it. Datawrapper leads you through a quick, simple 4-step process from uploading data to publishing your chart. This service helps you on the way. If you still have any questions in mind, Datawrapper offers >100 how-to articles and great support to you.
Datawrapper visualizations offer professional, on-brand design and great layout on all devices. The Datawrapper team has delved into the data visualization field for years and work as practitioners in international newsrooms such as the New York Times, NPR, Deutsche Welle, Bloomberg, Correctiv, and ZEIT Online. They know a good chart design. Datawrapper’s design defaults keep your visualizations easy to understand. Your charts will be visually delightful and readable on desktop, tablets, smartphones, in your reports, or in print. And you can create a custom design theme so that everyone in your team creates white-labeled visualizations in your brand design.

Datawrapper offers three plans:

Create and publish unlimited charts, maps & tables, export them as PNGs and collaborate in teams for free.
With the Custom plan for $599/month, your visualizations will come in your company design and you can export them as PDFs and SVGs.
The Enterprise plan includes on-premise installations, custom chart types, support & SLA agreements, and self-hosting.

User scenario

Datawrapper is used by print and online newsrooms, financial institutions, government departments, think tanks, and universities. Learn…

how a stats office in Belgium uses it to make statistics a public good
how the biggest newspaper in Norway transitioned from print to digital-first with Datawrapper
why a D.C.-based think tank switched to Datawrapper after building an internal charting tool

3.FineReport

FineReport is a smart reporting and dashboard software designed for enterprises to meet the visualization needs in business.

The advantage of FineReport

FineReport provides impressive self-developed HTML5 charts that can be smoothly displayed on any website or cool 3D web page with dynamic effects. It adapts to any screen size, from TVs and large screens to mobile devices.
Besides the real-time display, the innovative data entry function allows you to input the data directly into the databases via online forms so as to collect data and update your databases.
As a 100% Java software, it is compatible with any business systems and helps you integrate and visualize your business data in a comprehensive manner.
The prices of the product and service

For personal use, FineReport is free without time and function limits.
For enterprise use, FineReport is quote-based.
User scenario

Based on the data entry and visualization features, it is convenient to integrate FineReport with other business systems to automate reports or construct business applications such as an attendance system, ordering application, etc.
Thanks to the adaptive display, you can show KPI dashboards on TV screens in the conference, or display the cool dashboard on large screens in the industry expo.

4.FeedbackWhiz

FeedbackWhiz helps Amazon sellers increase profits and reviews.

It can monitor, manage, and automate emails, product reviews, orders, and feedback; build professional email templates using buttons, gifs, and emojis; A/B test subject lines and view open rate analytics; send or exclude emails based on triggers such as refunds, shipment, delivery, and feedback.

Instant notifications available when reviews are posted. It helps monitor all product reviews and listings; and users will get alerts when reviews, hijackers, buy-box loss, and listing changes occur. A comprehensive profit and loss tool allows you to customize and view data for all your ASINS to get real-time accurate profits and compare them easily across all ASINs and marketplaces.

The functions - Email Automation, Listing Monitoring, Product Review Monitoring, and Profit and Loss Tool will give Amazon sellers systematic insight into their business.

FeedbackWhiz offers Free Plan and Paid Plans depending on the package.

5.Adobe Spark Post

The great thing about Adobe Spark, a free infographic maker, is the ease of use. Without any coding or design skills, you can generate bespoke visuals that deliver information in the most engaging way with our pre-made templates. You don’t have to worry about your marketing budget, and you can remain in charge of the design process while sitting at your own desk.

It’s free to start, but $9.99 per months for premium subscription:

https://spark.adobe.com/es-ES/pricing/

Conclusion

We are overwhelmed by boundless data. However, both small, medium-sized businesses and large enterprises need to take data management seriously thus to be able to survive in this highly competitive age. Professional, easy-to-use data visualization tools empower companies to extract actionable insights from their data. We can establish a data-driven business culture by making data analytics accessible for business users.

We hope the use of these tools can inspire you to make better business decisions and help with your business growth in the year 2020.

Build a URL Scraper Within Minutes

fooooo-png — Mon, 27 Jul 2020 06:56:32 +0000

It’s pretty easy to get an URL from any website. Control+C and Control+V, done! But what if you need to gather hundreds and thousands of URLs for a website? I don’t think we would love to do the copy-paste over and over again. In this case, a URL scraper is necessary.

You probably wonder why would you even need to collect URLs. In most cases, people will collect, for instance, images, videos or campaign links to set up a content aggregation site for reference purposes. And of course, this may bring many potential business corporation opportunities.

In this article, I would love to show you how to build a URL scraper within minutes without coding. Everyone can nail it down after reading through the whole article.

Step 1: Install Octoparse on your computer.

In this case, I will use the Octoparse to present how to build a URL scraper. If you want to follow up on this lesson, simply download the Octoparse.

Step 2: Prepare Octoparse Scraping 101.

Before using a new tool, it’s better to be familiar with its working logic. Thus, if you’re new to Octoparse, please go check how Octoparse works in general.

Step 3: Choose one of the following methods to build a URL Scraper.

Method 1: Click on the image to extract the URL directly

Method 2: Scrape the source code and reformat

Let's get started！！

Method 1: Click on the image to extract the URL directly

In this case, I will show you how to scrape the laptop image URLs on BestBuy. Simply search “Laptop” on BestBuy, you could get the URL (https://www.bestbuy.com/site/searchpage.jsp?st=laptop&_dyncharset=UTF-8&_dynSessConf=&id=pcat17071&type=page&sc=Global&cp=1&nrp=&sp=&qp=&list=n&af=true&iht=y&usc=All+Categories&ks=960&keys=keys) of the search result.

1) Open Octoparse on your computer. Then click to enter “Advanced Mode”

2) Simply copy and past the Bestbuy URL, you have into the website box. Then, click the “Save URL” bottom.

With the above steps, you could have the website opened in the Octoparse built-in browser.

3) Generally speaking, we need the image URLs from all pages or as many as possible. Is that difficult? Of course not when you use Octoparse.

After clicking “>” on the website in Octoparse, you can see some options on the Action Tips penal. These options are generated automatically by Octoparse Algorithm.

Then, simply create a loop item by clicking the “Loop click next page”

Now, the loop is created in the workflow.

4) Now, we can click on the image to extract the URL directly.

Click on two of the images on the webpage, helping Octoparse to recognize the IMG field. Once Octoparse success recognizes the image successfully, we are able to see the “IMG'' element display on the bottom of the Action Tips penal.

Then, just follow the tips to click “Extract the Image URL in loop”.

5) With the above 4 steps, we have created a URL scraper in Octoparse. The final step is to extract the image URLs.

Click “Start extraction” - “Local extraction”, then Octoparse starts to gather the Image URLs.

Method 2: Scrape the source code and reformat

To demonstrate this method, I would like to show you how to gather the image URLs on bing.com. The target URL is :

https://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images;_ylt=AwrTLYhyuXpecKgAKT5XNyoA;_ylu=X3oDMTB0NjZjZzZhBGNvbG8DZ3ExBHBvcwMxBHZ0aWQDBHNlYwNwaXZz?p=data&fr2=piv-web&fr=yfp-t&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly9zZWFyY2gueWFob28uY29tL3NlYXJjaD9wPWRhdGEmZnI9eWZwLXQmZnA9MSZ0b2dnbGU9MSZjb3A9bXNzJmVpPVVURi04&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAH_Lvoa2_TPXpQeDHOLM9JD-gnVES1ReYo-iBs1Fzqcv9IDU0a69HjMyzLIcQ43LIZyX8UdtboXMWeUOI2Yr3ljRnQnFO4xWWruAdh87SDTjBngp_XsPH7fKd4E6qWEugxDfILKdR9h4zIWqqkHoG689rKTcb43tjtNXhcw8im67&_guc_consent_skip=1585101208

1) Open the target website in Octoparse, which is similar to what we did previously.

2) After having the target URL opened in Octoparse's built-in browser, we simply need to click on the page randomly. Then, we click “<<” and select “HTML” on the bottom of the Action Tips penal.

Then, we can simply select “extract outer HTML of the selected element” to get the source code of the whole website.

The whole HTML is displayed in the Data Customization Area.

Go back to the website, (https://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images;_ylt=AwrTLYhyuXpecKgAKT5XNyoA;_ylu=X3oDMTB0NjZjZzZhBGNvbG8DZ3ExBHBvcwMxBHZ0aWQDBHNlYwNwaXZz?p=data&fr2=piv-web&fr=yfp-t&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly9zZWFyY2gueWFob28uY29tL3NlYXJjaD9wPWRhdGEmZnI9eWZwLXQmZnA9MSZ0b2dnbGU9MSZjb3A9bXNzJmVpPVVURi04&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAH_Lvoa2_TPXpQeDHOLM9JD-gnVES1ReYo-iBs1Fzqcv9IDU0a69HjMyzLIcQ43LIZyX8UdtboXMWeUOI2Yr3ljRnQnFO4xWWruAdh87SDTjBngp_XsPH7fKd4E6qWEugxDfILKdR9h4zIWqqkHoG689rKTcb43tjtNXhcw8im67&_guc_consent_skip=1585101208) on your own browser, and press Ctrl + Shift + I, you can see the HTML of the website.

If you’re careful enough, you can easily figure out the shared features of the image URLs.

They start with “https://” and end with “” id=”. Once we get this, we can easily to pick the image URLs out of the sources code by using the Octoparse tool, called “Reformat”

3) Let’s go back to Octoparse! Click the highlighted icon on the Data Customization Area.

Then, we have 4 options for us to further customize the data we selected. In this case, what we need to do is to “Refine extracted data”.

Click “Add step” and we can see the reformat options. Choose “Match with Regular Expression”

Click “Try RegEx Tool”

Then, simply fill in the blanks, telling Octoparse what data format you want. Octoparse will automatically generate the RexEx and help pick out the information you need.

After some clicks, we can see all the URLs on the page appear on the left bottom box.

4) Now, we can extract the data with the URL scraper we built just now!

Are these two methods of building a URL scraper easy for you? Anyway, just do it and you will know! If there is any problem you encounter when creating the URL scraper, you're so welcome to contact support at support@octoparse.com

Besides, although the methods are about building an image URL scraper, you could extend that to create a video URL scraper or an email scraper according to your needs. The logic of creating a URL scraper is the same!

Author：Erika

Movie Crawler: Scraping 100,000+ Movie Information

fooooo-png — Mon, 20 Jul 2020 06:50:12 +0000

The data of movies record audiences' preferences and their attitude towards certain things. Gathering the movie info from relative websites, like IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes, will contribute to data analysis and data mining in the film industry. Generally speaking, the scraped data can be employed in some scenario:

· Analyzing the features of the target audience
· Obtaining public opinions to predict the coming trends
· Helping the Advertising Push

There are still more things that we can do with the movie data according to the needs. To help you fulfill data gathering, this article will introduce how to scrape the information from the IMDb Horror movie list, including director information, the cast of actors, and some other important information.

In this case, I’ll show you how to scrape the 134,555 Horror movie information from IMDb, using the link:

https://www.imdb.com/search/title/?genres=horror&start=51&explore=title_type,genres&ref_=adv_nxt

The goal of this web scraper is to find films that are listed on the Horror movie list, obtaining director information, the cast of actors, and some other important information.

Before getting started, please download Octoparse V7 on your computer to follow up. Besides, it’s highly recommended to learn the basic logic of using Octoparse.

Let’s get started

Step 1: Open the target website in the Octoparse built-in browser.

Simply click “+task” under the Advanced Mode.

Then, paste the URL to the box and click the “Save URL” button.

Step 2: Click to build a task to scrape the movie information.
After having the RUL opened in the Octoparse built-in browser, we can continue to build a pagination and a loop item to get the data.

Simply click the “next>>” element in the built-in browser and then click “Loop click selected element” on the Action Tips.

We can see the pagination has been built in the workflow.

If you want to make the Octoparse recognize the element you selected more precisely, you could simply revise the XPath. As we can see in the below picture, the XPath that Octoparse generated is //DIV[@class='nav']/DIV[2]/A[2]. We’d better change it to //a[contains(text(), "Next »")]

In this case, we need to scrape the data from the movie list, which says, we can directly create a loop item to extract the data.

Select one of the “blocks” on the browser, Octoparse can detect all the data fields in the blog you selected.

Then, select “Select all sub-elements”.

All the needed data are being selected by Octoparse and highlighted in red. Select “Select All” to continue.

Finally, we select “Extract data in the loop”.

Now, we have both the pagination and the loop item done in Octoparse. We can see the workflow of the task on the left side and the data that are displayed on the right side.

Step 3: Clean the data in Octoparse.

Before extracting data, we’d better clean the data to make our final result better. Simple need to click to delete the unwanted field and rename the description you need.

Step 4: Extract data
Simply click “Extract data” to get the data locally.

As local extraction utilizes your own computer resources, such as the CPU, internet speed, it works slower than using Octoparse cloud extraction.

Anyway, after creating the scraper, what you need to do is wait and get the data, more than 100,000 lines of movie data in about 2 hours.

With the above steps, I suppose, everyone, including those who have no programming background can easily build a movie crawler with Octoparse V7 and get more than 100,000 lines of the movie information. However, that's not the easiest way. Using Octoparse V8 could be much easier:

All in all, with data scraping, we can obtain the movie data online with any legal issue.

Apart from the data, the more important is about the skill you learned, which is extremely useful for doing the market research, keeping yourself updating, and many other things.