Free Webscraping

Saturday, January 23, 2021

ParseHub is a free web scraping tool. This advanced web scraper allows extracting data is as easy as clicking the data you need. It is one of the best data scraping tools that allows you to download your scraped data in any format for analysis. Features: Clean text & HTML before downloading data; The easy to use graphical interface. Web scraping has never been so easy Scrape and extract data from any webpage without getting blocked! Try it out with Free API calls, No payment info required.

Related Articles on Price Scraping:

In the commercial field, a large amount of scraped data can be used for business analysis. We can scrape the details, like price, stock, rating and etc, covering various data fields to monitor the change of the items. These data scraped can further help analysts and market sellers to evaluate the potential value or make more significant decisions.

However, we can’t scrape all the data with website APIs.

Some websites provide APIs for users to access part of their data. But even though these sites provide APIs, there still exist some data fields that we couldn’t scrape or have no authentication to access.

For example, Amazon provides a Product Advertising API, but the API itself couldn’t provide access to all the information displayed on its product page for people to scrape, like price and etc. In this case, the only way to scrape more data, saying the price data field, is to build our own scraper by programming or use certain kinds of automated scraper tools.

It's hard to scrape data, even for programmers.

Sometimes, even if we know how to scrape data on our own by programming, like using Ruby or Python, we still couldn’t scrape data successfully for various reasons. In most cases, we probably would be forbidden to scrape from certain websites due to our suspicious repeating scraping actions within a very short time. If so, we may need to utilize IP proxy which automates IPs’ leaving without being traced by those target sites.

The possible solutions described above may require people to be familiar with coding skills and more advanced technical knowledge. Otherwise, it could be a tough or impossible task for us to complete.

To make scraping websites available for most people, I’d like to list several scraper tools that can help you scrape any commercial data, including price, stock, reviews and etc, in a structured way with higher efficiency and much faster speed.

Octoparse

You can use this scraper tool to scrape many websites, like Amazon, eBay, AliExpress, Priceline and etc, for data including price, reviews, comments and etc. Users don't need to know how to code to scrape data, but they need to learn to configure their tasks.

The configuration of tasks is easy to grasp, the UI is very user-friendly, as the picture you can see below. There is a Workflow Designer pane where you can point & drag the functional visual blocks. It simulates human browsing behaviors and scrape the structured data users need. Using this scraper, you can use the Proxy IP only by setting certain Advanced Options, which is very efficient and fast. Then, you can scrape data, including price, reviews and etc, as you need after completing the configuration.

The extraction of hundreds or more data can be completed within seconds. You can scrape any data type as you want, the data frames will be returned like the figure below which includes price and customer evaluation scraped results.

Notice: to all users, there are two editions of Octoparse Scraping Service - the Free Edition and the Paid Edition. Both editions will provide the basic scraping needs for users, which means users can scrape data and export it into various formats, like CSV, Excel formats, HTML, TXT, and database (MySQL, SQL Server, and Oracle). While, if you want to scrape data with a much more faster speed, you can upgrade your free account to any paid account in which Cloud Service is available. There will be at least 4 cloud servers with Octoparse Cloud Service working on your task simultaneously. Here's a video introducing Octoparse Cloud Service.

Additionally, Octoparse also offers Data Service, which means you can express your scraping needs and requirements and the support team will help scrape the data you need.

Import.io

Import.io is also known as a web crawler covering all different levels of crawling needs. It offers a Magic tool which can convert a site into a table without any training sessions. It suggests users to download its desktop app if more complicated websites need to be crawled.

Once you’ve built your API, they offer a number of simple integration options such as Google Sheets, Plot.ly, Excel as well as GET and POST requests. It also provides Proxy Servers to prevent users from being detected by target websites, and you can scrape as much data as you need. It is not hard to use this tool at all, the UI of Import. Io is quite friendly to use. You can refer to their official tutorials to learn how to configure your own scraping tasks. When you consider that all this comes with a free-for-life price tag and an awesome support team, import.io is a clear first port of call for those on the hunt for structured data. They also offer a paid enterprise-level option for companies looking for more large scale or complex data extraction.