An Efficient Web Scraping Program Suggested By Semalt
Right now, web scraping has become an indispensable business strategy with virtually all organizations adopting it. Unfortunately, the technique has not been fully exploited because of certain challenges. Of course, you can do an online search to get the content you want, and you can copy it. However, that is only possible with a little amount of data. You will definitely require a web scraping tool to harvest vast amount of data. The biggest challenge here is the requirement of programming experience.
You need to have a certain level of programming experience and knowledge to be able to configure most web scraping tools properly. But only a very few people have programming experience. Apart from that, coding web scraping tool is quite tedious and time-consuming to even highly experienced programmers. To make matters worse, you may need to modify the code of your software for every targeted website because every website is unique. This is why this new web scraping tool has taken the world by storm. It requires no programming knowledge, and it is efficient. The name of the tool is OutWit Hub.
OutWit Hub is actually a Firefox add-on that can be downloaded and installed on your browser. With the software, you will scrape different websites with only a few clicks of your mouse. While the program has the capabilities to scrape different types of websites with default settings, you can also customize it to suit your needs.
Here Is How To Use The Software
You need to download it from Mozilla add-on store and install in your Firefox browser. After installation, the add-on will not take effect until you restart your browser. You will find some simple scraping options on the left pane of the application. Although these options are basic, they are enough for you to extract required images and text from a web page or any of the links on the page.
However, the basic options cannot carry out advanced web scraping tasks. If you need advanced options, you need to go to Automators, and then move to Scrapers section. The source code of your target web page will be displayed here. The next step is to look for the tagged attributes in the code. They can be used as markers for your required data elements before extraction.
Now, you should fill the "Marker before" and "Marker after" fields, and click the execute button. After that, you only need to sit back and watch how OutWit Hub does its job. This program gives you the liberty to use multiple scrapers at the same time, thereby improving the turnaround time.
This is just a general procedure for extracting data. The documentation section of the add-on comes with different tutorials for different data extraction requests/needs. You will find the processes faster and easier when you master them. So, it is advisable to study the tutorials religiously.
OutWit Hub has the capabilities to handle complicated data extractions with its numerous sophisticated functions. So, you may need to understand the use of every function. For instance, to extract data from several target sites that have similar structures, you need the function called "Format Column".
In conclusion, OutWit Hub is a great data scraping add-on for both programmers and non-programmers. It also has numerous functions that you should learn. The more complex functions you use, the faster and better, your web scraping results will be.
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