Semalt: How To Use Crawlboard Web Extraction Platform
There are so many tutorials for DIY web scraping all over the Internet. If you only need to extract just a small amount of data, the tutorials can help. But if you need to extract a large volume of data on a regular basis, then you should hire an experienced third-party web scraping company. Crawlboard is one of the providers of such services, and a lot of people have been using it for their web scraping task. The platform is very efficient. So, it is recommended for people who need to scrape a large amount of data regularly.
Apart from its efficiency, it is also easy to use. The simple steps required to make use of the platform have been outlined here.
Step 1:
Go to CrawlBoard web scraping request page by clicking this link. Fill the registration form appropriately. There are fields for the first name, last name, company email address, and job role. When you are done, just click the sign-up button. An automatic mail will be sent to the email address you provided for verification. Open the email and click on the verification link to activate your new CrawlBoard account.
Step 2:
The primary objective of this step is to add a site to crawl, but you need first to create a sitegroup. A sitegroup is a group of sites having a similar structure. This is for people that usually need to scrape data from multiple sites at once.
To create a sitegroup, click on the "Create a new sitegroup" link. It is located on the right side of Sitegroup selection box. After that, you can now add all the sites that belong to the sitegroup one after the other by clicking on the Add link that is located on the top right corner of the page. Then, select the sites one by one.
Step 3:
Go to the sitegroup creation window to provide a preferred unique name for your sitegroup. Remember that all the sites in a sitegroup should have the same structure otherwise, you may not get accurate content.
To understand the significance of sitegroup, take job listing sites for example. If the requested task is to scrape jobs from job boards, then you will need to create a sitegroup to match the function and all the sites in the sitegroup will be job listing sites.
Step 4:
According to the required fields on this screen, you need to choose the frequency of data extraction, delivery format, and method of delivery. Frequencies of data scraping are daily, weekly, monthly, and custom.
For delivery format, you can choose one among XML, JSON, and CSV. And for delivery method, you need to select among FTP, Dropbox, Amazon S3, and REST API.
Step 5:
The screen is meant for additional information. It is for users to describe their web scraping task further. Although it is optional, it is important to include additional information because the more you describe your task, the more the service provider will understand exactly what you want, and it will yield a better result.
You can also ask for some value-added services on this screen. Some of them are Hosted indexing, File merging, Image downloads, and Expedited delivery.
Step 6:
Here, you only need to click on the "Send for feasibility check" button. The purpose is for the service provider to check if your task is feasible. You will get an email informing you if your task is feasible or not. If it is, you can now go and make payment. Once your payment is confirmed, CrawlBoard team will swing into action.
After paying, you only need to await your data feeds in the format specified by you, via your preferred delivery method.
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