Semalt Expert Shares 7 Website Scraper Techniques
Web scraping is the complicated process that involves extracting information or data from a site, with or without the consent of the webmaster. Though scraping is done manually, some web scraping techniques can save both your time and energy. These are priceless techniques with no possibility of uncertainties and errors.
1. Google Docs:
Google Sheets is used as a powerful scraping tool. It is one of the best and most famous web scraping programs. It is useful only when the scrapers want specific patterns or data to be extracted from a blog or site. You can also use this one to check if your site is scrape-proof or not.
2. Text pattern matching technique:
It is a regular expression matching technique used in conjugation with the UNIX grep commands going with famous programming languages such as Python and Perl.
3. Manual scraping: copy-paste technique:
The manual scraping is done by the user himself and takes a lot of time and efforts. Most of the activities are repetitive and time-consuming as you would have to take content from multiple websites without letting the web crawlers knowing about your activities. A couple of web programmers and developers use automated bots for this purpose.
4. HTML parsing technique:
The HTML parsing is done with the help of HTML and Javascript. It mainly targets nested or linear HTML pages. This is one of the fastest and most robust methods used for the text extraction, link extractions, nested links, the screen scraping and resource extraction.
5. DOM Parsing technique:
Document Object Model (also known as DOM) is the style, content, and structure of a web page with particular XML files. Scrapers widely use the DOM parsers for in-depth information about the nature and structure of a website. You can use these DOM parsers to get the nodes of useful information. Alternatively, you can try tools such as XPath and scrape your favorite web pages instantly. The full-fledged web browsers such as Mozilla and Chrome can be embedded for extracting the whole website, or it's few parts, even when the articles are generated manually and are of dynamic nature.
6. Vertical aggregation technique:
Big companies and businesses widely use the vertical aggregation technique with heavy computer powers. It helps target the specified verticals and runs the data on its cloud device. Creation and monitoring of the bots for particular verticals is done using this technique, and no human interference is needed.
7. XPath:
The XML Path Language (shortly written as XPath) is the query language that will work on the XML documents in a better way. As the XML documents involve several tree structures, the XPath can help navigate across the trees by selecting the nodes based on their varieties and parameters. This technique is also used in conjugation with both DOM parsing and HTML parsing. It is useful to extract the whole website and publish its varying sections ate the desired locations.
If you don't want any of these techniques and are looking for a tool, you may try Wget, Curl, Import.io, HTTrack or Node.js.
Post a comment
