- 1. Web Scraper Chrome Extension Reviews
- 2. What is Web Scraping?
- 3. How Do Web Scraper Chrome Extension Work?
- 4. Features Of Web Scraping Software
- 5. Benefits Of Web Scraping Services
- 6. Pros & Cons Of Web Scraper Extension
- 7. Price Of Web Scraper Chrome Extension
- 8.
- 9. Let see reviews from member who used Web Scraper
- 10. Final Words
Web Scraper Chrome Extension Reviews
The most valuable asset, data, lives and evolves on the Internet. Each piece of data is stuck on a web page, in an unstructured format. However, to make use of this data, it should be in a structured format. This is where web scraping comes into play.
Web scraping means extracting data from websites in a usable and a structured format. Web scraping can be done in many different ways, such as manual data gathering (simple copy/paste), custom scripts, or web scraping tools, such as Parsehub.
Web scraping tools are often the approach chosen by data scientists and companies due to them being fast, cost effective and highly accurate.
If your business depends on data, then using a web scraping tool will help your business use better data.
What is Web Scraping?
Web Scraping is a type of Web Crawling, and is the process of using software to browse the content of sites of interest and subsequently extract data from visited pages. The intention of scarping is to extract the site essence usually for business needs. For example, an online site can scrape its competitors in order to extract the prices they offer.
There are two impacts for scraping: the first and obvious one is the business impact. It discloses sensitive information from the site which was not meant to be disclosed in such a manner, the second is bandwidth – the scrapers activity can consume even 50% of the site bandwidth forcing the site to pay and increase its bandwidth.
How Do Web Scraper Chrome Extension Work?
Automated web scrapers work in a rather simple but also complex way. After all, websites are built for humans to understand, not machines.
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 in question. More advanced scrapers will render the entire website, including CSS and Javascript elements.
Then the scraper will either extract all the data on the page or specific data selected by the user before the project is run.
Ideally, the user will go through the process of selecting the specific data they want from the page. For example, you might want to scrape an Amazon product page for prices and models but are not necessarily interested in product reviews.
Lastly, the web scraper will output all the data that has been collected into a 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.
Features Of Web Scraping Software
The companies that provide web extraction make use of genuine and reliable software that extract the most precise information. Following features make it most unique:
- Complete data is extracted.
- It is user friendly.
- Exact data is extracted that includes forms for filling data if required.
- Data can be extracted from any website.
Benefits Of Web Scraping Services
The following unique benefits of these services have made them most popular:
- The unstructured data is converted into structured one that is the basic need for hitting the goal.
- Formless information collected from varied web contents is transformed into well organized and presentable documents.
- The specific information is extracted well.
- It is also known as web harvesting services, these are made use of in shipping. These companies use these services for facilitating the information about their products to their clients. The latter are apprised about the terms and conditions of services.
- Stores supplying their products online are able to provide the information of their products to their clients and branches. Their head offices and the prospective clients are also informed about the procedures that may access them.
- Web scraping helps in development of various organizations to great extent.
- Valuable time of the clients is saved to much extent.
- Reliable information is made available.
- Comprehensive information is possible because it is collected from varied websites.
- It covers a wide area as the information is accessible by millions of people in the globe.
- Sales figures also go up in considerable manners.
Pros & Cons Of Web Scraper Extension
To help you get the whole picture, we will list each advantage and disadvantage of web scraping that we consider to be important.
Web Scraper Pros
Here are the advantages of data scraping.
- Automation
Imagine how much time you would spend if you had to copy and paste each piece of information you need from a website. Not only would this take hours but it would drain all your energy. Luckily, scraping software automates most of the associated processes.
- Accuracy
Not only is scraping fast but it is also extremely accurate. This prevents any major mistakes which can occur as a result of smaller data extraction mistakes made during the process.
- Data management
You use spreadsheets and databases to manage figures and numerals on your computer, but you can’t really do this on a website configured in HTML. With web scraping tools, this is made possible.
Web Scraper Cons
However, there are also some limitations of web scraping.
- Disruption
Webmasters tend to change their websites frequently in order to improve their functionality, which can easily break the logic of web scraping software.
- Inability to keep up
Websites are only getting better, which makes it extremely difficult for data scraping tools to extract and store data accurately.
- IP detection
This may be the biggest of all web scraping problems. When you regularly scrape data from a single IP, it will be recognized and blocked. However, you can easily solve this problem by using a proxy.
Price Of Web Scraper Chrome Extension
The cost for scraping a website varies, with some online freelancers offering extremely low prices such as $10/website.
However, scraping companies will tend to charge a higher price.
An experiment on Web Scraping services pricing
We contacted several scraping companies with a quote request for a weekly scrape of 6000 products on Amazon in four categories to extract the title, price, brand, description, ASIN, rating, number of reviews and the "Sold by" name and URL.
These are some of the quotes we received:
- $400 initial setup and $4500 - $5000 USD per year for managed services (assuming a middle ground of $4750, this is $395/month maintenance)
- $99 initial setup, $79/month for monthly maintenance and $5 per 10000 records per month (assuming 6000 records per week, this adds on $12 per month for a total of $91/month maintenance)
- $149 initial setup and $100/month maintenance
- $329 initial setup and the first 10,000 lines of data. After that, each additional record will be charged at $0.005/line. At 24,000 products per month, this is about $120/month maintenance
While it's a small sample, it is about a $244 average for the initial setup and a $177 average monthly maintenance fee. These prices are more or less in line with those reported by scraping.pro. Not too shabby if the project isn't too complex!
Let see reviews from member who used Web Scraper
- A web scraper is a piece of software that goes to a website, grabs pages & then parses out the interesting/useful data. Let's say you want to follow the price of items at Amazon - your web scraper would request the page, find the item name & price and return that to you in a clean, easy to work with format. Some of them get more complicated because you have to handle form submissions or horrible HTML but the idea's still the same - an automated tool to extract information from a web page.
- Yahoo has stock quotes. You can go to their website and view these anytime you like. But what if you wanted to put these stock quotes into a spreadsheet and do some number crunching? And what if Yahoo did not provide a way to download this data as excel spreadsheets? One way would be to go through the website and just enter all the data into the spreadsheet manually. This would take too long, and will be prone to errors.
- These days, most sites that want you to have their data have some sort of public API for getting just the info out. Scrapers are still needed when you're trying to get information that people don't really want to hand out or they're just too cheap/lazy to provide a clean view of the data.
- Powerful tool that beats the others out there. Has a learning curve to it but once you conquer that the sky's the limit. Definitely a tool worth making a donation on and supporting for continued development. Way to go for the authoring crew behind this tool.
- Instead of telling you WHAT a web scraper is (since other people have already done that), I will tell you about what they can accomplish and some of my own projects, so you can get a feel for why people would want to write such programs.
- This is fantastic! I'm saving hours, possibly days. I was trying to scrap and old site, badly made, no proper divs or markup. Using the WebScraper magic, it somehow "knew" the pattern after I selected 2 elements. Amazing. Yes, it's a learning curve and you HAVE to watch the video and read the docs
Final Words
In summary, web scraping is a highly in-demand skill that you can learn with relative ease. It is a great opportunity for agencies, consultants and freelancers to add web scraping to their service line-up.
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