Semalt Expert – Free Screen Scraping Tools
The need for data backed decision making is forcing businesses all over to invest in data scraping. As a result, there's a growing need for such programs that will be able to automatically harvest data from websites and store it in an accessible retrievable form as well as ease of access.
But, the majority of these businesses are still in their young stages, and as such, it would be somewhat harmful to increase their operating costs by forcing them to buy premium scraping software. Now let us go ahead and look at some of the top free screen scraping software out there.
Outwit Hub
Unlike other scraping solutions, this one runs on your browser. By just installing the Outwit Hub Firefox extension from the add-ons store, you will have the capability to scrape right from the comfort of your Firefox browser. The extension is easy to use and does not require any programming skills. Also, you don't have to even a single dime to use this software.
Web Scraper Chrome Extension
Just like the previous software, the Web Scrapper Chrome Extension is a browser plugin. All you need to do is to download it from the Chrome store, and you are ready to go. The scraper can handle pages with Ajax and JavaScript making it compatible with different projects. The add-on lets you export your scraped data in CSV files as well as Google Sheets.
Fminer
Fminer is one of the most common scrapers out there. This can be attributed to its ease of use. After installing the program and launch it, you will be greeted by a visual dashboard which is intuitive when it comes to data harvesting projects. The setup also allows you to handle huge complex data scraping projects that require proxy server lists and multi-layered crawls.
Octoparse
Octoparse is a client-side web scraper for the windows platform. The setup process is relatively easy, and you will be able to harvest both unstructured and semi-structured data from websites. The program, however, does not require any coding knowledge so it will be useful to even the newbies.
Spinn3r
Spinn3r relies on the firehose API which is responsible for 95 percent of the crawling and indexing work. The program also gives you an added option to filter data using keywords to avoid harvesting irrelevant data. The program saves extracted data in JSON format while continuously scanning and updating the data sets. The admin console will also be a welcome haven for you to play around with he included futures.
Diffbot
If you are a developer, then this is the best tool for your entire screen scraping jobs. The program will be able to retrieve online data on the go and also offer more analysis solutions on the go. Its build on computer vision and deep machine learning services to structure web data with better accuracy. This allows you to crawl entire sites automatically by just giving the scraper a domain name and it will automatically spider and extract the data on its own.
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