Semalt Expert Defines Some Attractive Features Of Web Scraper
To put it in the simplest term, a site scraper is a program, application, or software used to copy content from a website, transforms the scraped content into the stipulated format and also saves it in a specified location.
Just like how Google crawlers perform indexing functions on websites, site scrapers function in a similar way. The only difference is that Google crawlers crawl all the websites on the web while site scrapers only scrape data from certain websites specified by their users.
A typical scraper can download any data from a specified website or download the whole website. It can also follow links to other content for further downloads. Depending on the purpose of the extraction, data scraped can be saved as XML, HTML, or CSV files. In addition, some data extraction tools can also export obtained data to other kinds of database. A very efficient data extraction tool is Web Scraper.
Web Scraper is an extension of chrome browser developed primarily for data extraction from various web pages. To enjoy this tool, you need to create a sitemap (a navigation plan) that it will use in navigating through web pages to scrape the required data.
With a good sitemap, Web Scraper will navigate through all the target websites to extract all the specified content and later export the extracted data as CSV. The extension can be installed from Chrome store.
Some Important Features Of The Tool
The tool has the capacity to scrape multiple web pages accurately at the same time so it offers both speed and efficiency. Remember, a lot of organizations need to scrape data from hundreds of web pages regularly. This feature will save their time.
Sitemaps and scrapped data are stored in browsers local storage or in CouchDB. The only advantage of this feature is the ability to use the sitemaps and the extracted data multiple times.
It can also extract multiple data selection types in one single run. You can configure it to extract text, images, and videos from multiple web pages all at the same time. You may sometimes require images and text on some particular web pages. Instead of extracting one data element before the other, you can extract both at once, in a matter of minutes.
It is often difficult for numerous web content extraction tools to scrape data from dynamic pages because the pages are usually coded with JavaScript and AJAX. This is where Web Scraper makes the difference. It can scrape any type of content from dynamic web pages easily.
After scraping required data, you can view all the extracted data before it is exported as CSV to the pre-specified location. In addition, your sitemaps can be imported and exported numerous times.
Unfortunately, it has a little drawback. It works only with Chrome browser. To be able to use it properly, you can access the documentation and tutorials on by visiting webscraper.io
You can submit bugs, seek help on any challenge and make suggestions on google-groups. In addition, you can also submit bugs and suggest features on GitHub-issues. No matter how efficient a tool is, there is always room for improvement. So, Google is open to helpful feedbacks on the tool. When you want to submit a bug, you should attach an exported sitemap if it is possible. It will help Google track the bug faster.
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