A java based automated tool for extracting data from any website and exported as JSON, CSV, XLS format.
Web scraping refers to the extraction of data from a website. This information is collected and then exported into a format that is more useful for the user. Be it a spreadsheet or an API.
Although web scraping can be done manually, in most cases, automated tools are preferred when scraping web data as they can be less costly and work at a faster rate. But in most cases, web scraping is not a simple task. Websites come in many shapes and forms, as a result, web scrapers vary in functionality and features.
Please note that you may encounter captchas when attempting to scrape some websites, so we suggest reading several guides on how to avoid & bypass captchas before scraping a website:
- How to avoid and bypass captchas
- Solving Captcha (for all Paid plans)
Automated web scrapers work in a rather simple but also complex way.
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- First, the web scraper will be given one or more URLs to load before scraping. The scraper then loads the entire HTML code for the page and renders the entire website, including CSS and Javascript elements.
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- Then the scraper will either extract all the data on the page or specific data dynamically at run time which must be specified by the user in the script.
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- Lastly, the web scraper will output all the data that has been collected into a XLS format that is more useful to the user. Most web scrapers will output data to a CSV or Excel spreadsheet, while more advanced scrapers will support other formats such as JSON which can be used for an API.
- Lastly, the web scraper will output all the data that has been collected into a XLS format that is more useful to the user. Most web scrapers will output data to a CSV or Excel spreadsheet, while more advanced scrapers will support other formats such as JSON which can be used for an API.
Industry Statistics and Insights
- Many companies use web scraping to build massive databases and draw industry-specific insights from these. These companies can then sell access to these insights to companies in said industries. For example, a company might scrape and analyze tons of data about oil prices, exports and imports in order to sell their insights to oil companies across the world.
Comparison Shopping Sites
- Some several websites and applications can help you to easily compare pricing between several retailers for the same product. One way that these websites work is by using web scrapers to scrape product data and pricing from each retailer daily. This way, they can provide their users with the comparison data they need.
- Scraping product data from sites like Amazon or eBay for competitor analysis.
- Scraping sports stats for betting or fantasy leagues
- Scraping site data before a website migration
- Scraping product details for comparison shopping
- Scraping financial data for market research and insights
- Scraping stock prices into an app API
- Scraping data from YellowPages to generate leads
- Scraping data from a store locator to create a list of business locations And More....