All You Need To Know About Web Scraping And Web Scraping Apps

  • By Kenneth Evans
  • 06-07-2018
  • Web Apps
web scrapping apps
The most effective business strategy now is web scraping. In case the term is strange to you, you can find all you need to know about it below. It has become a common practice among business organizations to engage in web scraping for different purposes. So, several app developers India have developed several types of web scraping tools.
 
What is Web Scraping?
Web scraping is simply the process of developing programs, robots, or mobile app development by app developers India that can extract content, data, and images from websites. Web scraping is used legally for crawling websites with the use of search engine bots so as to ranking websites. This application of web scraping is an exclusive preserve of search engines.
 
It is also used by researchers to extract data from online forums, social media, and other platforms where required data can be extracted. Organizations also use web scraping apps to extract the prices and promotional offers from competitors’ websites.
 
Scraper tools and bots
Web scraping tools are software, applications, and programs that filter through databases and pull out certain data. However, most scrapers are designed by app developers to do the following 
 
- Extract data from APIs
- Save extracted data
- Transform extracted data
- Identify unique HTML site structures
 
Unfortunately, data extraction has both positive and negative applications. This was made known by one of the experienced app developers India. The negative application of web scraping tool is known as malicious web scraping.
 
Examples of malicious web scraping
Once scraping is carried out without the permission of the website owners, it is regarded as malicious web scraping. The two commonest cases of the crime are content theft and price scraping for price comparisons. 
 
Price scraping
A perpetrator of this kind of malicious scraping uses a botnet from which scraper programs are used to scrape the prices of competitors. Their main aim is to undercut their competitors since lower cost is the most important factors considered by customers. Unfortunately, victims of price scraping will continue to encounter loss of sales, loss of customers, and loss of revenue while perpetrators will continue to enjoy more patronage.
 
Content Scraping
Content scraping is a large-scale illegal scraping of content from another site. Victims of this kind of theft are usually companies that rely on online product catalogues for their business. Websites that drive their business with digital content are also prone to content scraping. Unfortunately, this attack can be devastating for them.
 
Why you need data scraping tools

Data scraping
Data scraping is the process of using an application, or software to extract data from a website for different uses. Although data scraping may sound like a technical term, it can be carried out easily with an easy-to-use tool or application.
 
These tools can also be used to extract some data that you need from specific web pages much faster and easier. Your computer will do the work faster and better because computers are able to recognize one another within just a few minutes no matter how large their databases are. So, some of these applications can easily extract specific data and format them for them for different purposes. 
 
For those that are not aware of these tools, here is the list of some effective scrapping tools that you can rely on. 
 
Diffbot
 
diffbot
 
This distinguishing feature of this tool is its business-friendly approach. You can use it to search through your competitors’ work to extract useful information. It can also be used to assess the performance of your own webpage. You can also use it to get useful product data from process websites, web crawlers, forums, images, and articles. 
 
When used very well, this tool can give you all the information required to back up your argument and presentation to your peers and to your board. This will make your presentation more convincing.
 
Import.io
 
import io
 
This tool can also help you get the required data from any source on the web. In fact, it has the ability to grab data from any site in about 30 seconds. However, it depends on how simple, structured, and complicated the data is. The most striking feature of this tool is its multitasking ability. It can be used for multiple URLs all at once.
 
For instance, to get the city that hires through LinkedIn the most, this tool can help you out in no time. The better you structure your query, the faster you will get a response. 
 
Kimono
 
kimono
 
This tool is different is unique. It does not require any coding, downloading, or installation to extract data. With it, you can scrape data from web APIs easily. All it requires is for you to enter the web address of the source website into Kimono app. 
 
For repeated use, you can create a setting on the application. This setting includes the frequency of the required data scraping. It could be daily, weekly, or monthly. Another fantastic feature of this tool is that you can use its API to output the extracted data in CSV or JSON files that can easily be pasted into your spreadsheet or Infogram. 
 
For ease of use, Kimono comes with a built-in login-to-Infogram for you to create your own visualizations and it also comes with a gallery that collects examples created after each data scraping session. 
 
ScraperWiki
 
scrapperwiki
 
This tool gives users two clear choices. You can either extract data from PDFs or you can develop your own scrapping tool in any of Python, Ruby, and PHP. However, the second option is meant for highly experienced and tech-savvy users. In addition, it also offers paid consulting services. One of the services it offers is tutorials for coding. 
 
Grabz.it
 
grabz it
 
This tool can be used for direct data extraction from different websites. It can also compress heavy videos by converting them to GIF files that are less heavy and also smaller in size. This is necessary so that your app or web page can load fast. Since videos are sometimes too heavy, they slow applications and websites down, the animated GIF may be a better option for websites. And this tool will do the conversion for you easily. 
 
In addition, this tool is made for people who code in languages like Ruby, Python, Perl, PHP, Node.js, Java, JavaScript, and ASP.NET.
 
For those that prefer programming aspect of the process, it is advisable to use Python programming language to build their own scraping tool. This is usually the best option if your scraping tools do not recognize the kind of data you want. 

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Author

Kenneth Evans

Kenneth Evans is a Content Marketing Strategist for Top App Development Companies, a research platform for top app development companies in the world. He has been contributing to various blogging platforms like top software companies and Forums.

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