A Site Scraper Service Explained By Semalt
A site scraper is a type of program whose primary function is to copy content from an external website and make use of it. Site scrapers essentially have the same functions as web crawlers. Both of these programs work to index websites. However, it is important to note that web crawlers are responsible for covering the whole web, but a site scraper's main objective is to target user-specified websites.
The program purposes to mirror content from another website with the primary objective of generating revenue, often through the selling of user data and advertisements. Nonetheless, it is essential that a scraping service provider sets up a monitoring service for the target user website and ensure that the scraping setup always under maintenance.
XML, CSV, HTML
Site scrapers can download any form of data, even from entire websites. This ability largely depends on the user specifications and the program itself. After the download, the software then follows the links to another external content for further downloading. The software can save the downloaded file types in different formats such as HTML, CSV or XML files. A most popular site scraper has an additional ability to enable a user to export the files to a compatible database.
Content scraping
This is an illegal technique of stealing original content from a known or legitimate website and posting the same content to another website without obtaining the relevant permissions from the content's owner. The sole intention is to pass off the stolen content as original content, with the failure of attributing it to the owner.
Site scraping has numerous functions; the most common are plagiarism and data theft. Furthermore, it facilitates users to incorporate scraped data from other websites. A website that is made up of scraped content from other websites is known as a scraper site.
Several scraper sites are hosted all over the world. In the past, some of the scraper sites have been asked to pull down any copyrighted material, but instead of pulling them down, they just disappear or switch the domains.
Examples of site scrapers
The World Wide Web is always growing its quality and data size, which leads to the need for data enthusiasts to look for alternative platforms of extracting data from the web. Technological advancements have facilitated the development of different types of site scrapers to acquire data from a preferred website.
There are a variety of site scrapers that exist in the net today. Some of the best site scrapers that are readily available in the market today include Wget, Scraper, Web Content Extractor, Scrape Goat, Web Scraper Chrome extension, Spinn3r, ParseHub, Fminer, etc.
Nonetheless, there are other ways of site scraping. They include creating search engines and displaying snippets in one's SERPS, grabbing of a page from a website and reformatting it to create a personalized web directory, obtaining stock process from one website, and displaying the same on another one.
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