What is web scraping?
It’s extracting data, such as product information from an e-commerce site, from websites.
Why use a web scraper?
Some companies don’t provide data via APIs and yet this data could be useful to something you’re trying to develop. If you’re a business owner and are interested in getting information about competitors you could scrape their websites on a regular schedule to accomplish this. Going through a website to manually obtain lots of information (maybe using the copy/paste method) is an inefficient use of time. It can also be used for data science projects such as those involving machine learning where you may have trouble finding the data necessary for your project.
Why WebScraper.io?
This was my first go at web scraping so naturally I started Googling web scrapers and quickly realized the overwhelming amount of options. I use a MacBook and many only supported Windows OS, although I’m not sure why this was the case. I came across WebScraper.io, which is a free Chrome extension. This tool runs right in your Chrome browser, has detailed documentation and is fairly straight forward to use. After you build out how you want to navigate and scrape the website you can watch the scraping take place in a secondary browser. After it’s done scraping you can export the data to a CSV file.
Web data extraction tool with an easy point-and-click interface for modern web
Free and easy to use web scraping tool for everyone.
With a simple point-and-click interface, the ability to extract thousands of records from a website takes only a few minutes of scraper setup.
Web Scraper utilizes a modular structure that is made of selectors, which instructs the scraper on how to traverse the target site and what data to extract. Thanks to this structure, Web Scraper is able to extract information from modern and dynamic websites such as Amazon, Tripadvisor, eBay, and so on, as well as from smaller, lesser-known websites.
Web Scraper runs in your browser and doesn't anything require to be installed on your computer. You don't need any Python, PHP, or JavaScript coding experience to start scraping with Web Scraper. Additionally, Web Scraper offers you the ability to completely automate data extraction in Web Scraper Cloud.
Once the data is scraped, download it as a CSV file that can be further imported into Excel, Google Sheets, etc.
What features Web Scraper offers?
Web Scraper is a simple web scraping tool that allows you to use many advanced features to get the exact information you are looking for. It offers features like:
* Data scraping from multiple pages;
* Multiple data extraction types (text, images, URL’s, and more);
* Scraping data from dynamic pages (JavaScript + AJAX, infinite scroll);
* Browsing scraped data;
* Exporting scraped data from a website to Excel;
* It is dependent only on the web browser; therefore, no extra software needed for you to start scraping.
How to use Web Scraper?
There are only a couple of steps you will need to learn in order to master web scraping:
1. Install Web Scraper and open Web Scraper tab in developer tools (which has to be placed at the bottom of the screen for Web Scraper to be visible);
2. Create a new sitemap;
3. Add data extraction selectors to the sitemap;
4. Lastly, launch the scraper and export scraped data.
It’s as easy as that!
What can Web Scraper be used for?
* Lead generation - email, phone number, other contact detail related data mining from various websites;
* E-commerce - product data extraction, product price scraping, description, URL extraction, image retrieving, etc;
* Website content crawling - extract information from news portals, blogs, forums and so on;
* Retail monitoring - monitor product performance, competitor or supplier stock and pricing, etc;
* Brand monitoring - product review, social content crawling for sentiment analysis;
* Business intelligence - gather data for key business decisions, learn from your competitors;
* Big data extraction for machine learning, marketing, business strategy developments, researches;
* And much more.
Web scraping can be a little bit difficult at first, that's why we have created informational guides that can help you.
