Data Scraping - What Are Hand-Scraped Hardwood Floors and What Are the Benefits?

If you love the look of hardwood flooring with lots of character, then you may want to check out hand-scraped hardwood flooring. Hand-scraped wood provides a warm vintage look, providing the floor instant character. These types of scraped hardwoods are suitable for living rooms, dining rooms, hallways and bedrooms. But what exactly is hand-scraped hardwood flooring?

Well, it is literally what you think it is. Hand-scraped hardwood flooring is created by hand using specialized wood working tools to make each board unique and giving an overall "old worn" appearance.

At Innovation Builders we offer solid wood floors finished on site with an actual hand-scraping technique followed by stain and sealer. Solid wood floors are installed by an expert team of technicians who work each board with skilled craftsman-like attention to detail. Following the scraping procedure the floor is stained by hand with a customer selected stain color, and then protected with multiple coats of sealing and finishing polyurethane. This finishing process of staining, sealing and coating the wood floors contributes to providing the look and durability of an old reclaimed wood floor, but with today's tough, urethane finishes.

There are many, many benefits to hand-scraped wood flooring. Overall, these floors are extremely durable and hard wearing, providing years of trouble-free use. These wood floors remain looking newer for longer because the texture that the process provides hides the typical dents, dings and scratches that other floors can't hide so easily. That's great news for households with kids, dogs, and cats.

These types of wood flooring have another unique advantage as well. When you do scratch these floors during their lifetime, the scratches are easily repaired. As long as the scratch isn't too deep you can make them practically disappear without ever having to hire a professional. It's simple to hide the scratch by using a color-matched stain marker or repair kit that is readily available through local flooring distributors. These features make hand-scraped hardwood flooring a lot more durable and hassle-free to maintain than other types of wood flooring.

The expert processes utilized in the creation of these floors provides a custom look of worn wood with deep color and subtle highlights. When the light hits the wood at different times during the day, it provides an understated but powerful effect of depth and beauty. They instantly offer your rooms a rustic look full of character, allowing your home to become a warm and inviting environment. The rustic look of this wood provides a texture, style and rustic appeal that cannot be matched by any other type of flooring.

Hand-Scraped Hardwood Flooring is a floor that says welcome and adds a touch of elegance to any home. If you are looking to buy a new home and you haven't had the opportunity to see or feel hand scraped hardwoods, stop in any of the model homes at Innovation Builders in Keller, North Richland Hills or Grand Prairie, Texas and check it out!

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?What-Are-Hand-Scraped-Hardwood-Floors-and-What-Are-the-Benefits?&id=6026646

Web scraping in under 60 seconds: the magic of import.io

Import.io is a very powerful and easy-to-use tool for data extraction that has the aim of getting data from any website in a structured way. It is meant for non-programmers that need data (and for programmers who don’t want to overcomplicate their lives).

I almost forgot!! Apart from everything, it is also a free tool (o_O)

The purpose of this post is to teach you how to scrape a website and make a dataset and/or API in under 60 seconds. Are you ready?

It’s very simple. You just have to go to http://magic.import.io; post the URL of the site you want to scrape, and push the “GET DATA” button. Yes! It is that simple! No plugins, downloads, previous knowledge or registration are necessary. You can do this from any browser; it even works on tablets and smartphones.

For example: if we want to have a table with the information on all items related to Chewbacca on MercadoLibre (a Latin American version of eBay), we just need to go to that site and make a search – then copy and paste the link (http://listado.mercadolibre.com.mx/chewbacca) on Import.io, and push the “GET DATA” button.

You’ll notice that now you have all the information on a table, and all you need to do is remove the columns you don’t need. To do this, just place the mouse pointer on top of the column you want to delete, and an “X” will appear.

Good news for those of us who are a bit more technically-oriented! There is a button that says “GET API” and this one is good to, well, generate an API that will update the data on each request. For this you need to create an account (which is also free of cost).

As you saw, we can scrape any website in under 60 seconds, even if it includes tons of results pages. This truly is magic, no? For more complex things that require logins, entering subwebs, automatized searches, et cetera, there is downloadable import.io software… But I’ll explain that in a different post.

Source: http://schoolofdata.org/2014/12/09/web-scraping-in-under-60-seconds-the-magic-of-import-io/

Web Scraping Services : Data Discovery vs. Data Extraction

Looking at screen-scraping at a simplified level, there are two primary stages involved: data discovery and data extraction. Data discovery deals with navigating a web site to arrive at the pages containing the data you want, and data extraction deals with actually pulling that data off of those pages. Generally when people think of screen-scraping they focus on the data extraction portion of the process, but my experience has been that data discovery is often the more difficult of the two.

The data discovery step in screen-scraping might be as simple as requesting a single URL. For example, you might just need to go to the home page of a site and extract out the latest news headlines. On the other side of the spectrum, data discovery may involve logging in to a web site, traversing a series of pages in order to get needed cookies, submitting a POST request on a search form, traversing through search results pages, and finally following all of the "details" links within the search results pages to get to the data you're actually after. In cases of the former a simple Perl script would often work just fine. For anything much more complex than that, though, a commercial screen-scraping tool can be an incredible time-saver. Especially for sites that require logging in, writing code to handle screen-scraping can be a nightmare when it comes to dealing with cookies and such.

In the data extraction phase you've already arrived at the page containing the data you're interested in, and you now need to pull it out of the HTML. Traditionally this has typically involved creating a series of regular expressions that match the pieces of the page you want (e.g., URL's and link titles). Regular expressions can be a bit complex to deal with, so most screen-scraping applications will hide these details from you, even though they may use regular expressions behind the scenes.

As an addendum, I should probably mention a third phase that is often ignored, and that is, what do you do with the data once you've extracted it? Common examples include writing the data to a CSV or XML file, or saving it to a database. In the case of a live web site you might even scrape the information and display it in the user's web browser in real-time. When shopping around for a screen-scraping tool you should make sure that it gives you the flexibility you need to work with the data once it's been extracted.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Discovery-vs.-Data-Extraction&id=165396

WordPress Titles: scraping with search url

I’ve blogged for a few years now, and I’ve used several tools along the way. zachbeauvais.com began as a Drupal site, until I worked out that it’s a bit overkill, and switched to WordPress. Recently, I’ve been toying with the idea of using a static site generator (a lá Jekyll or Hyde), or even pulling together a kind of ebook of ramblings. I also want to be able to arrange the posts based on the keywords they contain, regardless of how they’re categorised or tagged.

Whatever I wanted to do, I ended up with a single point of messiness: individual blog posts, and how they’re formatted. When I started, I seem to remember using Drupal’s truly awful WYSIWYG editor, and tweaking the HTML soup it produced. Then, when I moved over to WordPress, it pulled all the posts and metadata through via RSS, and I tweaked with the visual and text tools which are baked into the engine.

A couple years ago, I started to write in Markdown, and completely apart from the blog (thanks to full-screen writing and loud music). This gives me a local .md file, and I copy/paste into WordPress using a plugin to get rid of the visual editor entirely.

So, I wrote a scraper to return a list of blog posts containing a specific term. What I hope is that this very simple scraper is useful to others—WordPress is pretty common, after all—and to get some ideas for improving it, and handle post content. If you haven’t used ScraperWiki before, you might not know that you can see the raw scraper by clicking “view source” from the scraper’s overview page (or going here if you’re lazy).

This scraper is based on WordPress’ built-in search, which can be used by passing the search terms to a url, then scraping the resulting page:

http://zachbeauvais.com/?s=search_term&submit=Search

The scraper uses three Python libraries:

    Requests
    ScraperWiki
    lxml.html

There are two variables which can be changed to search for other terms, or using a different WordPress site:

term = "coffee"

site = "http://www.zachbeauvais.com"

The rest of the script is really simple: it creates a dictionary called “payload” containing the letter “s”, the keyword, and the instruction to search. The “s” is in there to make up the search url: /?s=coffee …

Requests then GETs the site, passing payload as url parameters, and I use Request’s .text function to render the page in html, which I then pass through lxml to the new variable “root”.

payload = {'s': str(term), 'submit': 'Search'}

r = requests.get(site, params=payload)  # This'll be the results page

html = r.text

root = lxml.html.fromstring(html)  # parsing the HTML into the var root

Now, my WordPress theme renders the titles of the retrieved posts in <h1> tags with the CSS class “entry-title”, so I loop through the html text, pulling out the links and text from all the resulting h1.entry-title items. This part of the script would need tweaking, depending on the CSS class and h-tag your theme uses.

for i in root.cssselect("h1.entry-title a"):

    link = i.cssselect("a")

    text = i.text_content()

    data = {

        'uri': link[0].attrib['href'],

        'post-title': str(text),

        'search-term': str(term)

    }

    if i is not None:

        print link

        print text

        print data

        scraperwiki.sqlite.save(unique_keys=['uri'], data=data)

    else:

        print "No results."

These return into an sqlite database via the ScraperWiki library, and I have a resulting database with the title and link to every blog post containing the keyword.

So, this could, in theory, run on any WordPress instance which uses the same search pattern URL—just change the site variable to match.

Also, you can run this again and again, changing the term to any new keyword. These will be stored in the DB with the keyword in its own column to identify what you were looking for.

See? Pretty simple scraping.

So, what I’d like next is to have a local copy of every post in a single format.

Has anyone got any ideas how I could improve this? And, has anyone used WordPress’ JSON API? It might be a logical next step to call the API to get the posts directly from the MySQL DB… but that would be a new blog post!

Source: https://scraperwiki.wordpress.com/2013/03/11/wordpress-titles-scraping-with-search-url/

Data Scraping Services - Web Scraping Video Tutorial Collection for All Programming Language

Web scraping is a mechanism in which request made to website URL to get  HTML Document text and that text then parsed to extract data from the HTML codes.  Website scraping for data is a generalize approach and can be implemented in any programming language like PHP, Java, C#, Python and many other.

There are many Web scraping software available in market using which you can extract data with no coding knowledge. In many case the scraping doesn’t help due to custom crawling flow for data scraping and in that case you have to make your own web scraping application in one of the programming language you know. In this post I have collected scraping video tutorials for all programming language.

I mostly familiar with web scraping using PHP, C# and some other scraping tools and providing web scraping service.  If you have any scraping requirement send me your requirements and I will get back with sample data scrape and best price.

 Web Scraping Using PHP

You can do web scraping in PHP using CURL library and Simple HTML DOM parsing library.  PHP function file_get_content() can also be useful for making web request. One drawback of scraping using PHP is it can’t parse JavaScript so ajax based scraping can’t be possible using PHP.

Web Scraping Using C#

There are many library available in .Net for HTML parsing and data scraping. I have used Web Browser control and HTML Agility Pack for data extraction in .Net using C#

I have didn’t done web scraping in Java, PERL and Python. I had learned web scraping in node.js using Casper.JS and Phantom.JS library. But I thought below tutorial will be helpful for some one who are Java and Python based.

Web Scraping Using Jsoup in Java

Scraping Stock Data Using Python

Develop Web Crawler Using PERL

Web Scraping Using Node.Js

If you find any other good web scraping video tutorial then you can share the link in comment so other readesr get benefit form that.

Source: http://webdata-scraping.com/web-scraping-video-tutorial-collection-programming-language/

Web Scraping Services - Extracting Business Data You Need

Would you like to have someone collect, extract, find or scrap contact details, stats, list, extract data, or information from websites, online stores, directories, and more?

"Hi-Tech BPO Services offers 100% risk-free, quick, accurate and affordable web scraping, data scraping, screen scraping, data collection, data extraction, and website scraping services to worldwide organizations ranging from medium-sized business firms to Fortune 500 companies."

At Hi-Tech BPO Services we are helping global businesses build their own database, mailing list, generate leads, and get access to vast resources of unstructured data available on World Wide Web.

We scrape data from various sources such as websites, blogs, podcasts, and online directories; and convert them into structured formats such as excel, csv, access, text, My SQL using automated and manual scraping technologies. Through our web data scraping services, we crawl through websites and gather sales leads, competitor’s product details, new offers, pricing methodologies, and various other types of information from the web.

Our web scraping services scrape data such as name, email, phone number, address, country, state, city, product, and pricing details among others.

Areas of Expertise in Web Scraping:

•    Contact Details
•    Statistics data from websites
•    Classifieds
•    Real estate portals
•    Social networking sites
•    Government portals
•    Entertainment sites
•    Auction portals
•    Business directories
•    Job portals
•    Email ids and Profiles
•    URLs in an excel spreadsheet
•    Market place portals
•    Search engine and SEO
•    Accessories portals
•    News portals
•    Online shopping portals
•    Hotels and restaurant
•    Event portals
•    Lead generation

Industries we Serve:

Our web scraping services are suitable for industries including real estate, information technology, university, hospital, medicine, property, restaurant, hotels, banking, finance, insurance, media/entertainment, automobiles, marketing, human resources, manufacturing, healthcare, academics, travel, telecommunication and many more.

Why Hi-Tech BPO Services for Web Scraping?

•    Skilled and committed scraping experts
•    Accurate solutions
•    Highly cost-effective pricing strategies
•    Presence of satisfied clients worldwide
•    Using latest and effectual web scraping technologies
•    Ensures timely delivery
•    Round the clock customer support and technical assistance

Get Quick Cost and Time Estimate

Source: http://www.hitechbposervices.com/web-scraping.php

Which language is the most flexible for scraping websites?

3 down vote favorite

I'm new to programming. I know a little python and a little objective c, and I've been going through tutorials for each. Then it occurred to me, I need to know which language is more flexible (python, obj c, something else) for screen scraping a website for content.

What do I mean by "flexible"?

Well, ideally, I need something that will be easy to refactor and tweak for similar projects. I'm trying to avoid doing a lot of re-writing (well, re-coding) if I wanted to switch some of the variables in the program (i.e., the website to be scraped, the content to fetch, etc).

Anyways, if you could please give me your opinion, that would be great. Oh, and if you know any existing frameworks for the language you recommend, please share. (I know a little about Selenium and BeautifulSoup for python already).

4 Answers

I recently wrote a relatively complex web scraper to harvest a TON of data. It had to do some relatively complex parsing, I needed it to stuff it into a database, etc. I'm C# programmer now and formerly a Perl guy.

I wrote my original scraper using Python. I started on a Thursday and by Sunday morning I was harvesting over about a million scores from a show horse site. I used Python and SQLlite because they were fast.

HOWEVER, as I started putting together programs to regularly keep the data updated and to populate the SQL Server that would backend my MVC3 application, I kept hitting snags and gaps in my Python knowledge.

In the end, I completely rewrote the scraper/parser in C# using the HtmlAgilityPack and it works better than before (and just about as fast).

Because I KNEW THE LANGUAGE and the environment so much better I was able to add better database support, better logging, better error handling, etc. etc.

So... short answer.. Python was the fastest to market with a "good enough for now" solution, but the language I know best (C#) was the best long-term solution.

EDIT: I used BeautifulSoup for my original crawler written in Python.

5 down vote

The most flexible is the one that you're most familiar with.

Personally, I use Python for almost all of my utilities. For scraping, I find that its functionality specific to parsing and string manipulation requires little code, is fast and there are a ton of examples out there (strong community). Chances are that someone's already written whatever you're trying to do already, or there's at least something along the same lines that needs very little refactoring.

1 down vote

I think its safe to say that Python is a better place to start than Objective C. Honestly, just about any language meets the "flexible" requirement. All you need is well thought out configuration parameters. Also, a dynamic language like Python can go a long way in increasing flexibility, provided that you account for runtime type errors.

1 down vote

I recently wrote a very simple web-scraper; I chose Common Lisp as I'm learning the language.

On the basis of my experience - both of the language and the availability of help from experienced Lispers - I recommend investigating Common Lisp for your purpose.

There are excellent XML-parsing libraries available for CL, as well as libraries for parsing invalid HTML, which you'll need unless the sites you're parsing consist solely of valid XHTML.

Also, Common Lisp is a good language in which to implement DSLs; a DSL for web-scraping may be a solution to your requirement for flexibility & re-use.

Source: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/74998/which-language-is-the-most-flexible-for-scraping-websites/75006#75006

Scraping Data: Site-specific Extractors vs. Generic Extractors

Scraping is becoming a rather mundane job with every other organization getting its feet wet with it for their own data gathering needs. There have been enough number of crawlers built – some open-sourced and others internal to organizations for in-house utilities. Although crawling might seem like a simple technique at the onset, doing this at a large-scale is the real deal. You need to have a distributed stack set up to take care of handling huge volumes of data, to provide data in a low-latency model and also to deal with fail-overs. This still is achievable after crossing the initial tech barrier and via continuous optimizations. (P.S. Not under-estimating this part because it still needs a team of Engineers monitoring the stats and scratching their heads at times).

Social Media Scraping

Focused crawls on a predefined list of sites

However, you bump into a completely new land if your goal is to generate clean and usable data sets from these crawls i.e. “extract” data in a format that your DB can process and aid in generating insights. There are 2 ways of tackling this:

a. site-specific extractors which give desired results

b. generic extractors that result in few surprises

Assuming you still do focused crawls on a predefined list of sites, let’s go over specific scenarios when you have to pick between the two-

1. Mass-scale crawls; high-level meta data – Use generic extractors when you have a large-scale crawling requirement on a continuous basis. Large-scale would mean having to crawl sites in the range of hundreds of thousands. Since the web is a jungle and no two sites share the same template, it would be impossible to write an extractor for each. However, you have to settle in with just the document-level information from such crawls like the URL, meta keywords, blog or news titles, author, date and article content which is still enough information to be happy with if your requirement is analyzing sentiment of the data.

cb1c0_one-size

A generic extractor case

Generic extractors don’t yield accurate results and often mess up the datasets deeming it unusable. Reason being

programatically distinguishing relevant data from irrelevant datasets is a challenge. For example, how would the extractor know to skip pages that have a list of blogs and only extract the ones with the complete article. Or delineating article content from the title on a blog page is not easy either.

To summarize, below is what to expect of a generic extractor.

Pros-

•    minimal manual intervention
•    low on effort and time
•    can work on any scale

Cons-

•    Data quality compromised
•    inaccurate and incomplete datasets
•    lesser details suited only for high-level analyses
•    Suited for gathering- blogs, forums, news
•    Uses- Sentiment Analysis, Brand Monitoring, Competitor Analysis, Social Media Monitoring.

2. Low/Mid scale crawls; detailed datasets – If precise extraction is the mandate, there’s no going away from site-specific extractors. But realistically this is do-able only if your scope of work is limited i.e. few hundred sites or less. Using site-specific extractors, you could extract as many number of fields from any nook or corner of the web pages. Most of the times, most pages on a website share similar templates. If not, they can still be accommodated for using site-specific extractors.

cutlery

Designing extractor for each website

Pros-

•    High data quality
•    Better data coverage on the site

Cons-

High on effort and time

Site structures keep changing from time to time and maintaining these requires a lot of monitoring and manual intervention

Only for limited scale

Suited for gathering – any data from any domain on any site be it product specifications and price details, reviews, blogs, forums, directories, ticket inventories, etc.

Uses- Data Analytics for E-commerce, Business Intelligence, Market Research, Sentiment Analysis

Conclusion

Quite obviously you need both such extractors handy to take care of various use cases. The only way generic extractors can work for detailed datasets is if everyone employs standard data formats on the web (Read our post on standard data formats here). However, given the internet penetration to the masses and the variety of things folks like to do on the web, this is being overly futuristic.

So while site-specific extractors are going to be around for quite some time, the challenge now is to tweak the generic ones to work better. At PromptCloud, we have added ML components to make them smarter and they have been working well for us so far.

What have your challenges been? Do drop in your comments.

Source: https://www.promptcloud.com/blog/scraping-data-site-specific-extractors-vs-generic-extractors/

The Features of the "Holographic Meridian Scraping Therapy"

1. Systematic nature: Brief introduction to the knowledge of viscera, meridians and points in traditional Chinese medicine, theory of holographic diagnosis and treatment; preliminary discussion of the treatment and health care mechanism of scraping therapy; systemat­ic introduction to the concrete methods of the holographic meridian scraping therapy; enumerating a host of therapeutic methods of scraping for disorders in both Chinese and Western medicine to em­body a combination of disease differentiation and syndrome differen­tiation; and summarizing the health care scraping methods. It is a practical handbook of gua sha.

2. Scientific: Applying the theories of Chinese and Western medicine to explain the health care and treatment mechanism and clinical applications of scraping therapy; introducing in detail the practical manipulations, items for attention, and indications and contraindications of the scraping therapy. Here are introduced repre­sentative diseases in different clinical departments, for which scrap­ing therapy has a better curative effect and the therapeutic methods of scraping for these diseases. Stress is placed on disease differentia­tion in Western medicine and syndrome differentiation in Chinese medicine, which should be combined in practical application.

Although there are more than 140,000 kinds of disease known to modem medicine, all diseases are related to dysfunction of the 14 meridians and internal organs, according to traditional Chinese med­icine. The object of scraping therapy is to correct the disharmony in the meridians and internal organs to recover the normal bodily func­tions. Thus, the scraping of a set of meridian points can be used to treat many diseases. In the section on clinical application only about 100 kinds of common diseases are discussed, although the actual number is much more than that. For easy reference the "Index of Diseases and Symptoms" is appended at the back of the book.

3. Practical: Using simple language and plenty of pictures and diagrams to guarantee that readers can easily leam, memorize and apply the principles of scraping therapy. As long as they master the methods explained in Chapter Three, readers without any medical knowledge can apply scraping therapy to themselves or others, with reference to the pictures in Chapters Four and Five. Besides scraping therapy, herbal treatment for each disease or syndrome is explained and may be used in combination with the scraping techniques.

Referring to the Holographic Meridian Hand Diagnosis and pic­tures at the back of the book will enhance accuracy of diagnosis and increase the effectiveness of scraping therapy.

Since the first publication and distribution of the Chinese edition of the book in July 1995, it has been welcomed by both medical specialists and lay people. In March 1996 this book was republished and adopted as a textbook by the School for Advanced Studies of Traditional Chinese Medicine affiliated to the Institute of the Acu­puncture and Moxibustion of the China Academy of Traditional Chi­nese Medicine.

In order to bring this health care method to more and more peo­ple and to make traditional Chinese medicine better appreciated They have modified and replenished this book in the spirit of constant im­provement. They hope that they may make a contribution to the health care of mankind with this natural therapy which has no side-effects and causes no pollution.

They hope that the Holographic Meridian Scraping Therapy can help the health and happiness of more and more families in the world.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?The-Features-of-the-Holographic-Meridian-Scraping-Therapy&id=5005031

Dapper: The Scraper for the Common Man

Sometimes, especially with Web 2.0 companies, jargon can get a little bit out of hand. When someone says that a service allows you to "build an API for any website", it can be a bit difficult to understand what that really means.

However, put simply, Dapper is a scraper. Nothing more. It allows you to scrape content from a Web page and convert it into an XML document that can be easily used at another location. Though you won't find the words "scrape" or "scraper" anywhere on its site, that is exactly what it does.

What separates Dapper from other scrapers, both legitimate and illegitimate, is that it is both free and easy to use. In short, it makes the process of setting up the scraper simple enough for your every day Internet user. While one has never needed to be a geek to scrape RSS feeds, now the technologically impaired can scrape content from any site, even those that don't publish RSS feeds.

Though the TechCrunch profile of the service says that Dapper "aims to offer some legitimate, valuable services and set up a means to respect copyright" others are expressing concern about the potential for copyright violations, especially by spam bloggers.

Either way though, both the cause for concern and the potential dangers are very, very real.

What is Dapper

When a user goes to create a new "Dapp", he or she first needs to provide a series of links. These links must be on the same domain and in similar formats (IE: Google searches for different terms or different blog posts on a single site) for the service to work. Once the links have been defined, the user is then taken to a GUI where they pick out fields.

In a simple example where the user would create their own RSS feed for a blog, the post title might be one field, perhaps called "post title" and the body would be a second, perhaps called "post body". Dapper, much like the service social bookmarking Clipmarks, is able able to intelligently select blocks of text on a Web page, making it easy to ensure that the entire post body is selected and that extraneous information is omitted.

Once the fields have been selected, the user can then either create groups based upon those fields or simply save the dapp for future use. Once the Dapp has been saved, they can then use it to create both raw XML data, an RSS feed, a Google Gadget or any number of other output files that can be easily used in other services.

If you are interested in viewing a demo of Dapper, you can do so at this link.

There is little doubt that Dapper is an impressive service. It has taken the black art of scraping and made it into a simple, easy-to-use application that just about anyone can pick up. Though it might take a few tries to create a working Dapp, and certainly spending some time reading up on the service is required, most will find it easy to use, especially when compared to the alternatives.

However, it's this ease of use that has so many worried. Though scrapers have been around for many years, they have been either difficult to use or expensive. Dapper's power, when combined with its price tag and sheer ease of use, has many wondered that it might be ushering not a new age for the Web, but a new age for scrapers seeking to abuse other's hard work.

Cause for Concern

While being easy to use or free is not necessarily a problem in and of itself, in the rush to enable users to make an API for any site, they forget that many sites don't have one or restrict access to their APIs for very good reasons. RSS scraping is perhaps the biggest copyright issue bloggers face. It enables a plagiarist or spammer to not only steal all of the content on the blog right then, but also all of the content that will be posted in the future. This is a huge concern for many bloggers, especially those concerned about performing well in the search engines.

This has prompted many blogs to either disable their RSS feeds, truncate them or move them to a feed monitoring service such as Feedburner. However, if users can simply create their own RSS feeds with ease, these protections are circumvented and Webmasters lose control over their content.

Even with potential copyright abuse issues aside, Dapper creates potential problems for Webmasters. It bypasses the usual metrics that site owners have. A user who reads a site, or large portions of it, through a Dapp will not be counted in either the feed statistics or, depending on how Dapper is set up, even in the site's logs. All the while, the site is spending precious resources to feed the Dapp, taking money out of the Webmaster's pocket.

This combination of greater expense, less traffic and less accurate metrics can be dangerous to Webmasters who are working to get accurate traffic counts, visitor feedback or revenue.

Worse still, Dapp users also bypass any ads or other monetization tools that might be included in the site or the original RSS feed. This has a direct impact on sites trying to either turn a profit or, like this one, recoup some of the costs of hosting.

Despite this, it's the copyright concerns that reign supreme. Though screen scraping is not necessarily an evil technology, it is the sinister uses that have gotten the most attention and, sadly, seem to be the most common, especially in regards to blogs.

Even if the makers of Dapper is aiming to add copyright protection at a later date, the service is fully functional today and, though the FAQ states that they will "comply with any verified request by the lawful owner of the content to cease using his content," there is no opt-out procedure, no DMCA information on the United States Copyright Office Web site, no information on how to prevent Dapper from accessing your site and nothing but a contact page to get in touch with the makers of the service.

(Note: An email sent to the makers of Dapper on the 22nd has, as of yet, gone unanswered)

In addition to creating a potential copyright nightmare for Webmasters the site seems to be setting itself up for a lawsuit. In addition to not being DMCA Safe Harbor compliant (PDF), thus opening it up to copyright infringement lawsuits directly, the service seems to be vulnerable to a lawsuit under the MGM v. Grokster case, which found that service providers can be sued for infringement conducted by its users if they fail an "inducement" test. Sadly for Dapper, simply saying that it is the user's responsibility is not adequate to pass such a test, as Grokster found out. The failure to offer filtering technology and encouragement to create API's for "any" site are both likely strikes against Dapper in that regard.

To make matters more grim, copyright is not the only issue scrapers have to worry about, as one pair of lawyers put it, there are at least four different different legal theories that make scraping illegal including the computer fraud and abuse act, trespass against chattels and breach of contract. All in all, copyright is practically the least of Dapper's problems.

When it's all said and done, there is a lot of room for concern, not just on the part of Webmasters that might be affected by Dapper or its users, but also its makers. These intellectual property and other legal issues could easily sink the entire project.

Conclusions

It is obvious that a lot of time and effort went into creating Dapper. It's a very powerful, easy to use service that opens up interesting possibilities. I would hate to see the service used for ill and I would hate even worse to see all of the hard work that went into it lost because of intellectual property issues.

However, in its current incarnation, it seems likely that Dapper is going to encounter significant resistance on the IP front. There is little, if any protection or regard for intellectual property under the current system and, once bloggers find out that their content is being syndicated without their permission by the service, many are likely to start raising a fuss.

Even though Dapper has gotten rave reviews in the Web 2.0 community, it seems likely that traditional bloggers and other Web site owners will have serious objections to it. Those people, sadly, most likely have never heard of Dapper at this point.

With that being said, it is a service everyone needs to make note of. The one thing that is for certain is that it will be in the news again. The only question is what light will it be under.

Source: https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2006/08/24/dapper-the-scraper-for-the-common-man/

Web Scraping Services Are Important Tools For Knowledge

Data extraction and web scraping techniques are important tools to find relevant data and information for personal or business use. Many companies, self-employed to copy and paste data from web pages. This process is very reliable, but very expensive as it is a waste of time and effort to get results. This is because the data collected and spent less resources and time required to collect these data are compared.

At present, several mining companies and their websites effective web scraping technique specifically for the thousands of pages of information developed culture can be traced. The information from a CSV file, database, XML file, or any other source with the required format is alameda. understanding of correlations and patterns in the data, so that policies can be designed to assist decision making. The information can also be stored for future reference.

The following are some common examples of data extraction process:

In order to rule through a government portal, citizens who are reliable for a given survey name removed.

Competitive pricing and data products include scraping websites

To access the web site or web design Stock download the videos and photos of scratching

Automatic Data Collection

It regularly collects data on a regular basis. Automated data collection techniques are very important because they find the company’s customer trends and market trends to help. By determining market trends, it is possible to understand customer behavior and predict the likelihood of the data will change.

The following are some examples of automated data collection:

Monitoring of special hourly rates for stocks

collects daily mortgage rates from various financial institutions

on a regular basis is necessary to check the weather

By using web scraping services, you can extract all data related to your business. Then analyzed the data to a spreadsheet or database can be downloaded and compared. Storing data in a database or in a required format and interpretation of the correlations to understand and makes it easier to identify hidden patterns.

Data extraction services, it is possible pricing, email, databases, profile data, and consistently to competitors for information about the data. Different techniques and processes designed to collect and analyze data, and has developed over time. Web Scraping for business processes that have beaten the market recently is one. It is a process from various sources such as websites and databases with large amounts of data provides.

Some of the most common methods used to scrape web crawling, text, fun, DOM analysis and include matching expression. After the process is only analyzers, HTML pages or meaning can be achieved through annotations. There are many different ways of scaling data, but more importantly is working toward the same goal. The main purpose of using web scraping service to retrieve and compile data in databases and web sites. In the business world is to remain relevant to the business process.

The central question about the relevance of web scraping contact. The process is relevant to the business world? The answer is yes. The fact that it is used by large companies in the world and many awards speaks derivatives.

Source: http://www.selfgrowth.com/articles/web-scraping-services-are-important-tools-for-knowledge

Customized Web Data Extraction Solutions for Business

As you begin leading your business on the path to success, competitive analysis forms a major part of your homework. You have already mobilized your efforts in finding the appropriate website data scrapping tool that will help you to collect relevant data from competitive websites and shape them up into useable information. There is however a need to look for a customized approach in your search for Data Extraction tools in order to leverage its benefits in the best possible way.

Off-the-shelf Tools Impede Data Extraction

 In the current scenario, Internet Technologies are evolving in abundance. Every organization leverages this development and builds their websites using a different programming language and technology. Off-the-shelf Website Data extraction tools are unable to interpret this difference. They fail to understand the data elements that need to be captured and end up in gathering data without any change in the software source codes.

As a result of this incapability in their technology, off-the-shelf solutions often deliver unclean, incomplete and also inaccurate data. Developers need to contribute a humungous effort in cleaning up and structuring the data to make it useable. However, despite the time-consuming activity, data seldom metamorphoses into the desired information. Also the personnel dealing with the clean-up process needs to have sufficient technical expertise in order to participate in the activities. The endeavor however results in an impediment to the whole process of data extraction leaving you thirsting for the required information to augment business growth.

Understanding how Web Extraction tools work

Web Scrapping tools are designed to extract data from the web automatically. They are usually small pieces of code written using programming languages such as Python, Ruby or PHP depending upon the expertise of the community building it. There are however several single-click models available which tends to make life easier for non-technical personnel.

The biggest challenge faced by a successful web extractor tool is to know how to tackle the right page and the right elements on that page in order to extract the desired information. Consequently, a web extractor needs to be designed to understand the anatomy of a web page in order to accomplish its task successfully. It should be designed to interpret the meaning of HTML elements like , table rows () within those tables, and table data (<td>) cells within those rows in order to extract the exact data. It will also be interfacing with the

element which are blocks of text and know how to extract the desired information from it.

Customized Solutions for your business

 Customized Solutions are provided by most Data Scraping experts. These software's help to minimize the cumbersome effort of writing elaborate codes to successfully accomplish the feat of data extraction. They are designed to seamlessly search competitive websites,identify relevant data elements, and extract appropriate data that will be useful for your business. Owing to their focused approach, these tools provide clean and accurate data thereby eliminating the need to waste valuable time and effort in any clean-up effort.

Most customized data extraction tools are also capable of delivering the extracted data in customized formats like XML or CSV. It also stores data in local databases like Microsoft Access, MySQL, or Microsoft SQL.

Customized Data scraping solutions therefore help you take accurate and informed decisions in order to define effective business strategies.

Source: http://scraping-solutions.blogspot.in/2014_07_01_archive.html 

Benefits of Scraping Data from Real Estate Website

With so much of growth in the recent times in real estate industry, it is likely that companies would want to create something different or use another method, so as to get desired benefits. Thus, it is best to go with the technological advancements and create real estate websites to get an edge over others in the industry. And to get all the information regarding website content, one can opt for real estate data scraping methods.

About real estate website scraping

Internet has become an important part of our daily lives and in industry marketing procedures too. With the use of website scraping one can easily scrape real estate listing from various websites. One just needs the help of experts and with proper software and tools; they can easily collect all the relevant real estate data from the required real estate websites and make a structured file containing the information. With internet becoming a valid platform for information and data submitted by numerous sources from around the globe, it is necessary to gather them all in one place for companies. In this way, the company can know what it lacks and work upon their strategies so as to gain profit and get to the top of the business world by taking one step at a time.

Uses of real estate website scraping

With proper use of website scraping one can collect and scrape the real estate listings which can help the company in the real estate market area. One can draw the attention of potential customers by designing the company strategies in such a way as contemplating the changing trends in the real estate global arena. All this is done with the help of the data collected from various real estate websites. With the help of proper website, one can collect the data and these get updated whenever new information gets into the web portal. In this way the company is kept updated about the various changes happening around the global market and thus, ensure in making plans regarding the company. This way one can plan ahead and take steps that can lead to the company gaining profits in future.

Thus, with the help of proper real estate website scraping one can be sure of getting all the information regarding real estate market. This way one can work upon making the company move as per the market trends and get a stronghold in real estate business.

Source: https://3idatascraping.wordpress.com/2013/09/25/benefit-of-scraping-data-from-real-estate-website/

Three Common Methods For Web Data Extraction

Probably the most common technique used traditionally to extract data from web pages this is to cook up some regular expressions that match the pieces you want (e.g., URL's and link titles). Our screen-scraper software actually started out as an application written in Perl for this very reason. In addition to regular expressions, you might also use some code written in something like Java or Active Server Pages to parse out larger chunks of text. Using raw regular expressions to pull out the data can be a little intimidating to the uninitiated, and can get a bit messy when a script contains a lot of them. At the same time, if you're already familiar with regular expressions, and your scraping project is relatively small, they can be a great solution.

Other techniques for getting the data out can get very sophisticated as algorithms that make use of artificial intelligence and such are applied to the page. Some programs will actually analyze the semantic content of an HTML page, then intelligently pull out the pieces that are of interest. Still other approaches deal with developing "ontologies", or hierarchical vocabularies intended to represent the content domain.

There are a number of companies (including our own) that offer commercial applications specifically intended to do screen-scraping. The applications vary quite a bit, but for medium to large-sized projects they're often a good solution. Each one will have its own learning curve, so you should plan on taking time to learn the ins and outs of a new application. Especially if you plan on doing a fair amount of screen-scraping it's probably a good idea to at least shop around for a screen-scraping application, as it will likely save you time and money in the long run.

So what's the best approach to data extraction? It really depends on what your needs are, and what resources you have at your disposal. Here are some of the pros and cons of the various approaches, as well as suggestions on when you might use each one:

Raw regular expressions and code

Advantages:

- If you're already familiar with regular expressions and at least one programming language, this can be a quick solution.

- Regular expressions allow for a fair amount of "fuzziness" in the matching such that minor changes to the content won't break them.

- You likely don't need to learn any new languages or tools (again, assuming you're already familiar with regular expressions and a programming language).

- Regular expressions are supported in almost all modern programming languages. Heck, even VBScript has a regular expression engine. It's also nice because the various regular expression implementations don't vary too significantly in their syntax.

Disadvantages:

- They can be complex for those that don't have a lot of experience with them. Learning regular expressions isn't like going from Perl to Java. It's more like going from Perl to XSLT, where you have to wrap your mind around a completely different way of viewing the problem.

- They're often confusing to analyze. Take a look through some of the regular expressions people have created to match something as simple as an email address and you'll see what I mean.

- If the content you're trying to match changes (e.g., they change the web page by adding a new "font" tag) you'll likely need to update your regular expressions to account for the change.

- The data discovery portion of the process (traversing various web pages to get to the page containing the data you want) will still need to be handled, and can get fairly complex if you need to deal with cookies and such.

When to use this approach: You'll most likely use straight regular expressions in screen-scraping when you have a small job you want to get done quickly. Especially if you already know regular expressions, there's no sense in getting into other tools if all you need to do is pull some news headlines off of a site.

Ontologies and artificial intelligence

Advantages:

- You create it once and it can more or less extract the data from any page within the content domain you're targeting.

- The data model is generally built in. For example, if you're extracting data about cars from web sites the extraction engine already knows what the make, model, and price are, so it can easily map them to existing data structures (e.g., insert the data into the correct locations in your database).

- There is relatively little long-term maintenance required. As web sites change you likely will need to do very little to your extraction engine in order to account for the changes.

Disadvantages:

- It's relatively complex to create and work with such an engine. The level of expertise required to even understand an extraction engine that uses artificial intelligence and ontologies is much higher than what is required to deal with regular expressions.

- These types of engines are expensive to build. There are commercial offerings that will give you the basis for doing this type of data extraction, but you still need to configure them to work with the specific content domain you're targeting.

- You still have to deal with the data discovery portion of the process, which may not fit as well with this approach (meaning you may have to create an entirely separate engine to handle data discovery). Data discovery is the process of crawling web sites such that you arrive at the pages where you want to extract data.

When to use this approach: Typically you'll only get into ontologies and artificial intelligence when you're planning on extracting information from a very large number of sources. It also makes sense to do this when the data you're trying to extract is in a very unstructured format (e.g., newspaper classified ads). In cases where the data is very structured (meaning there are clear labels identifying the various data fields), it may make more sense to go with regular expressions or a screen-scraping application.

Screen-scraping software

Advantages:

- Abstracts most of the complicated stuff away. You can do some pretty sophisticated things in most screen-scraping applications without knowing anything about regular expressions, HTTP, or cookies.

- Dramatically reduces the amount of time required to set up a site to be scraped. Once you learn a particular screen-scraping application the amount of time it requires to scrape sites vs. other methods is significantly lowered.

- Support from a commercial company. If you run into trouble while using a commercial screen-scraping application, chances are there are support forums and help lines where you can get assistance.

Disadvantages:

- The learning curve. Each screen-scraping application has its own way of going about things. This may imply learning a new scripting language in addition to familiarizing yourself with how the core application works.

- A potential cost. Most ready-to-go screen-scraping applications are commercial, so you'll likely be paying in dollars as well as time for this solution.

- A proprietary approach. Any time you use a proprietary application to solve a computing problem (and proprietary is obviously a matter of degree) you're locking yourself into using that approach. This may or may not be a big deal, but you should at least consider how well the application you're using will integrate with other software applications you currently have. For example, once the screen-scraping application has extracted the data how easy is it for you to get to that data from your own code?

When to use this approach: Screen-scraping applications vary widely in their ease-of-use, price, and suitability to tackle a broad range of scenarios. Chances are, though, that if you don't mind paying a bit, you can save yourself a significant amount of time by using one. If you're doing a quick scrape of a single page you can use just about any language with regular expressions. If you want to extract data from hundreds of web sites that are all formatted differently you're probably better off investing in a complex system that uses ontologies and/or artificial intelligence. For just about everything else, though, you may want to consider investing in an application specifically designed for screen-scraping.

As an aside, I thought I should also mention a recent project we've been involved with that has actually required a hybrid approach of two of the aforementioned methods. We're currently working on a project that deals with extracting newspaper classified ads. The data in classifieds is about as unstructured as you can get. For example, in a real estate ad the term "number of bedrooms" can be written about 25 different ways. The data extraction portion of the process is one that lends itself well to an ontologies-based approach, which is what we've done. However, we still had to handle the data discovery portion. We decided to use screen-scraper for that, and it's handling it just great. The basic process is that screen-scraper traverses the various pages of the site, pulling out raw chunks of data that constitute the classified ads. These ads then get passed to code we've written that uses ontologies in order to extract out the individual pieces we're after. Once the data has been extracted we then insert it
into a database.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Three-Common-Methods-For-Web-Data-Extraction&id=165416

How to Properly Scrape Windows During The Cleaning Process

Removing ordinary dirt such as dust, fingerprints, and oil from windows seem simple enough. However, sometimes, you may find stubborn caked-on dirt or debris on your windows that cannot be removed by standard window cleaning techniques such as scrubbing or using a squeegee. The best way to remove caked-on dirt on your windows is to scrape it off. Nonetheless, you have to be extra careful when you are scraping your windows, because they can be easily scratched and damaged. Here are a number of rules that you need to follow when you are scraping windows.

Rule No. 1: It is recommended that you use a professional window scraper to remove caked-on dirt and debris from your windows. This type of scraper is specially made for use on glass, and it comes with certain features that can prevent scratching and other kinds of damage.

Rule No. 2: It is important to inspect your window scraper before using it. Take a look at the blade of the scraper and make sure that it is not rusted. Also, it must not be bent or chipped off at the corners. If you are not certain whether the blade is in a good enough condition, you should just play it safe by using a new blade.

Rule No. 3: When you are working with a window scraper, always use forward plow-like scraping motions. Scrape forward and lift the scraper off the glass, and then scrape forward again. Try not to slide the scraper backwards, because you may trap debris under the blade when you do so. Consequently, the scraper may scratch the glass.

Rule No. 4: Be extra cautious when you are using a window scraper on tempered glass. Tempered glass may have raised imperfections, which make it more vulnerable to scratches. To find out if the window that you are scraping is made of tempered glass, you have to look for a label in one of its corners.

Window Scraping Procedures

Before you start scraping, you have to wet your window with soapy water first. Then, find out how the window scraper works by testing it in a corner. Scrape on the same spot three or four times in forward motion. If you find that the scraper is moving smoothly and not scratching the glass, you can continue to work on the rest of the window. On the other hand, if you feel as if the scraper is sliding on sandpaper, you have to stop scraping. This indicates that the glass may be flawed and have raised imperfections, and scraping will result in scratches.

After you have ascertained that it is safe to scrape your window, start working along the edges. It is best that you start scraping from the middle of an edge, moving towards the corners. Work in a one or two inch pattern, until all the edges of the glass are properly scraped. After that, scrape the rest of the window in a straight pattern of four or five inches, working from top to bottom. If you find that the window is beginning to dry while you are working, wet it with soapy water again.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?How-to-Properly-Scrape-Windows-During-The-Cleaning-Process&id=6592930

What is HTML Scraping and how it works

There are many reasons why there may be a requirement to pull data or information from other sites, and usually the process begins after checking whether the site has an official API. There are very few people who are aware about the presence of structured data that is supported by every website automatically. We are basically talking about pulling data right from the HTML, also referred to as HTML scraping. This is an awesome way of gleaning data and information from third party websites.

Any webpage content that can be viewed can be scraped without any trouble. If there is any way provided by the website to the browser of the visitor to download content and use the same in a highly structured manner, in that case, accessing of the content programmatically is possible. HTML scraping works in an amazing manner.

Before indulging in HTML scraping, one can inspect the browser for network traffic. Site owners have a couple of tricks up their sleeve to thwart this access, but majority of them can be worked around.

Before moving on to how HTML scraping works, we must understand the reasons behind the same. Why is scraping needed? Once you get a satisfactory answer to this question, you can start looking for RSS or API feeds or various other traditional structured data forms. It is significant to understand that when compared with APIs, websites are more significant.

The most important advantage of the same is the maintenance of their websites where a lot of visitors visit rather than safeguarding structured data feeds. With Tweeter, the same has been publicly seen when it clamps down on the developer ecosystem. Many times, API feeds change or move without any prior warning. Many times, it can also be a deliberate attempt, but mostly, such issues or problems erupt as there is no authority or an organization that maintains or takes care of the structured data. It is rarely noticed, if the same gets severely mangled or goes offline. In case the website has certain issues or the website no longer works, the problem is more in the form of a ball in your court requiring dealing with the same without losing any time. api-comic-image

Rate limiting is another factor that needs a lot of thinking and in case of public websites, it virtually doesn’t exist. Besides some occasional sign up pages or captchas, many business websites fail to create and built defenses against any unwarranted automated access. Many times, a single website can be scraped for four hours straight without anyone noticing. There are chances that you would not be viewed under DDOS attack unless concurrent requests are being made by you. You will be seen just as an avid visitor or an enthusiast in the logs, that too, in case anyone is looking.

Another factor in HTML scraping is that one can easily access any website anonymously. Behavior tracking can be done with a few ways by the administrator of the website and this turns out to be beneficial if you want to privately gather the data. Many times, registration is imperative with APIs in order to get key and with any request being sent, this key also needs to be sent. But, in case of simple and straightforward HTTP requests, the visitor can stay anonymous besides cookies and IP address, which can again be spoofed.

The availability of HTML scraping is universal and there is no need to wait for the opening of the site for an API or for contacting anyone in the organization. One simply needs to spend some time and browse websites at a leisurely pace until the data you want is available and then find out the basic patterns to access the same.

Now you need to don a hat of a professional scraper and simply dive in. Initially, it may take some time to work up figuring out the way the data have been structured and the way it can be accessed just as we read APIs. If there is no documentation unlike APIs, you need to be a little more smart about it and use clever tricks.

Some of the most used tricks are

Data Fetching

The first thing that is required is data fetching. Find endpoints to begin with, that is the URLs that can help in returning the data that is required. If you are pretty sure about the data and the way it should be structured so as to match your requirements, you will require a particular subset for the same and later you can indulge in site browsing using the navigation tools.

GET Parameter

The URLs must be paid attention to and see the way it changes as you indulge in clicking between the sections and the way they divide into various subsections. Before starting, the other option that can be used is to straight away go to the search functionality of the site. Certain terms can be typed and the URL needs to be focused again for watching the changes on the basis of what is being searched. A GET parameter will be probably seen like q which changes on the basis of the search term used by you. Other GET parameters that are not being used can be removed from the URL until only the ones that are needed are left for data loading. Before a query string, there must always be a “?” beginning.

Now the time has come when you would have started to come across the data that you would like to see and want to access, but sometimes, there may be certain pagination issues that require to be dealt with. Due to these issues, you may not be able to see the data in its entirety. Single requests are kept away by many APIs as well from database slamming. Many times, clicking the next page can add some offset parameter that helps in data visibility on the page. All these steps will help you succeed in HTML scraping.

Source: https://www.promptcloud.com/blog/what-is-html-scraping-and-how-it-works/

The Nasty Problem with Scraping Results from the Engines

One theme that I've been concerned with this week centers around data transparency in the search engine world. Search engines provide information that is critical to the business of optimizing and growing a business on the web, yet barriers to this data currently force many companies to use methods of data extraction that violate the search engines' terms of service.

Specifically, we're talking about two pieces of information that no large-scale, successful web operation should be without. These include rankings (the position of their site(s) vs. their competitors) for important keywords and link data (currently provided most accurately through Yahoo!, but also available through MSN and in lower quality formats from Google).

Why do marketers and businesses need this data so badly? First we'll look at rankings:

•    For large sites in particular, rankings across the board will go up or down based on their actions and the actions of their competition. Any serious company who fails to monitor tweaks to their site, public relations, press and optimization tactics in this way will lose out to competitors who do track this data and, thus, can make intelligent business decisions based on it.

•    Rankings provide a benchmark that helps companies estimate their global reach in the search results and make predictions about whether certain areas of extension or growth make logical sense. If a company must decide on how to expand their content or what new keywords to target or even if they can compete in new markets, the business intelligence that can be extracted from large swaths of ranking data is critical.

•    Rankings can be mapped directly to traffic, allowing companies to consider advertising, extending their reach or forming partnerships

And, on the link data side:

•    Temporal link information allows marketers to see what effects certain link building, public relations and press efforts have on a site's link profile. Although some of this data is available through referring links in analytics programs, many folks are much more interested in the links that search engines know about and count, which often includes many more than those that pass traffic (and also ignores/doesn't count some that do pass traffic).

•    Link data may provide references for reputation management or tracking of viral campaigns - again, items that analytics don't entirely encompass.

•    Competitive link data may be of critical importance to many marketers - this information can't be tracked any other way.

I admit it. SEOmoz is a search engine scraper - we do it for our free public tools, for our internal research and we've even considered doing it for clients (though I'm seriously concerned about charging for data that's obtained outside TOS). Many hundreds of large firms in the search space (including a few that are 10-20X our size) do it, too. Why? Because search engine APIs aren't accurate.

Let's look at each engine's abilities and data sources individually. Since we've got a few hundred thousand points of data (if not more) on each, we're in a good position to make calls about how these systems are working.

Google (all APIs listed here):

•    Search SOAP API - provides ranking results that are massively different from almost every datacenter. The information is often less than useless, it's actually harmful, since you'll get a false sense of what's happening with your positions.

•    AJAX Search API - This is really designed to be integrated with your website, and the results can be of good quality for that purpose, but it really doesn't serve the job of providing good stats reporting.

•    AdSense & AdWords APIs - In all honesty, we haven't played around with these, but the fact that neither will report the correct order of the ads, nor will they show more than 8 ads at a time tells me that if a marketer needed this type of data, the APIs wouldn't work.

Yahoo! (APIs listed here):

•    Search API - Provides ranking information that is a somewhat accurate map to Yahoo!'s actual rankings, but is occassionally so far off-base that they're not reliable. Our data points show a lot more congruity with Yahoo!'s than Google's, but not nearly enough when compared with scraped results to be valuable to marketers and businesses.

•    Site Explorer API - Shows excellent information as far as number of pages indexed on a site and the link data that Yahoo! knows about. We've been comparing this information with that from scraped Yahoo! search results (for queries like linkdomain: and site:) and those at the Site Explorer page and find that there's very little quality difference in the results returned, though the best estimate numbers can still be found through a last page search of results.

•    Search Marketing API - I haven't played with this one at all, so I'd love to hear comments from those who have.

MSN:

•    Doesn't mind scraping as long as you use the RSS results. We do, we love them and we commend MSN for giving them out - bravo! They've also got a web search SDK program, but we've yet to give it a whirl. The only problem is the MSN estimates, which are so far off as to be useless. The links themselves, though, are useful.

Ask.com

•    Though it's somewhat hidden, the XML.Teoma.com page allows for scraping of results and Ask doesn't seem to mind, though they haven't explicitly said anything. Again, bravo! - the results look solid, accurate and match up against the Ask.com queries. Now, if Ask would only provide links

I know a lot of you are probably asking:

•    "Rand, if scraping is working, why do you care about the search engines fixing the APIs?"

•    The straight answer is that scraping hurts the search engines, hurts their users and isn't the most practical way to get the data. Let me give you some examples:

•    Scraped queries have to look as much like real users as possible to avoid detection and banning - thus, they affect the query data that search engineers use to improve web search.

•    These queries also hit advertisers - falsifying the number of "real" impressions that advertisers see and lowering their CTRs unnaturally.

•    They take up search engine resources and though even the heaviest scraping barely impacts their server loads, it's still an annoyance.

•    With all these negative elements, and so many positive incentives to have the data, it's clear what's needed - a way for marketers/businesses to get the data they need without hurting the search engines. Here's how they can do it:

•    Provide the search ranking position of a site in the referral string - this works for ranking data, but not for link data and since Yahoo! (and Google) both send referrals through re-directs at times, it wouldn't be a hard piece to add.

•    Make the API's accurate, complete and unlimited

•    If the last option is too ambitious, the search engines could charge for API queries - anyone who needs the data would be more than happy to pay for it. This might help with quality control, too.

•    For link data - serve up accurate, wholistic data in programs like Google Sitemaps and Yahoo! Search Submit (or even, Google Analytics). Obviously, you'd only get information about your own site after verifying.

I've talked to lots of people at the search engine level about making changes this week (including Jeremy, Priyank, Matt, Adam, Aaron, Brett and more). I can only hope for the best...

Source: http://moz.com/blog/the-nasty-problem-with-scraping-results-from-the-engines

Some Traps to know and avoid in Web Scraping

In the present day and age, web scraping comes across as a handy tool in the right hands. In essence, web scraping means quickly crawling the web for specific information, using pre-written programs. Scraping efforts are designed to crawl and analyze the data of entire websites, and saving the parts that are needed. Many industries have successfully used web scraping to create massive banks of relevant, actionable data that they use on a daily basis to further their business interests and provide better service to customers. This is the age of the Big Data, and web scraping is one of the ways in which businesses can tap into this huge data repository and come up with relevant information that aids them in every way.

Web scraping, however, does come with its own share of problems and roadblocks. With every passing day, a growing number of websites are trying to actively minimize the instance of scraping and protect their own data to stay afloat in today’s situation of immense competition. There are several other complications which might arise and several traps that can slow you down during your web scraping pursuits. Knowing about these traps and how to avoid them can be of great help if you want to successfully accomplish your web scraping goals and get the amount of data that you require.

Complications in Web Scraping

Over time, various complications have risen in the field of web scraping. Many websites have started to get paranoid about data duplication and data security problems and have begun to protect their data in many ways. Some websites are not generally agreeable to the moral and ethical implications of web scraping, and do not want their content to be scraped. There are many places where website owners can set traps and roadblocks to slow down or stop web scraping activities. Major search engines also have a system in place to discourage scraping of search engine results. Last but not the least, many websites and web services announce a blanket ban on web scraping and say the same in their terms and conditions, potentially leading to legal issues in the event of any scraping.

Here are some of the most common complications that you might face during your web scraping efforts which you should be particularly aware about –

•    Some locations on the intranet might discourage web scraping to prevent data duplication or data theft.

•    Many websites have in place a number of different traps to detect and ban web scraping tools and programs.

•    Certain websites make it clear in their terms and conditions that they consider web scraping an infringement of their privacy and might even consider legal redress.

•    In a number of locations, simple measures are implemented to prevent non-human traffic to websites, making it difficult for web scraping tools to go on collecting data at a fast pace.

To surmount these difficulties, you need a deeper and more insightful understanding of the way web scraping works and also the attitude of website owners towards web scraping efforts. Most major issues can be subverted or quietly avoided if you maintain good working practice during your web scraping efforts and understand the mentality of the people whose sites you are scraping.

Web Crawling Services & Web Scraping Services

Common Problems

With automated scraping, you might face a number of common problems. The behavior of web scraping programs or spiders presents a certain picture to the target website. It then uses this behavior to distinguish between human users and web scraping spiders. Depending on that information, a website may or may not employ particular web scraping traps to stop your efforts. Some of the commonly employed traps are –

Crawling Pattern Checks – Some websites detect scraping activities by analyzing crawling patterns. Web scraping robots follow a distinct crawling pattern which incorporates repetitive tasks like visiting links and copying content. By carefully analyzing these patterns, websites can determine that they are being caused by a web scraping robot and not a human user, and can take preventive measures.

Honeypots – Some websites have honeypots in their webpages to detect and block web scraping activities. These can be in the form of links that are not visible to human users, being disguised in a certain way. Since your web crawler program does not operate the way a human user does, it can try and scrape information from that link. As a result, the website can detect the scraping effort and block the source IP addresses.

Policies – Some websites make it absolutely apparent in their terms and conditions that they are particularly averse to web scraping activities on their content. This can act as a deterrent and make you vulnerable against possible ethical and legal implications.

Infinite Loops – Your web scraping program can be tricked into visiting the same URL again and again by using certain URL building techniques.

These traps in web scraping can prove to be detrimental to your efforts and you need to find innovative and effective ways to surpass these problems. Learning some web crawler tips to avoid traps and judiciously using them is a great way of making sure that your web scraping requirements are met without any hassle.

What you can do

The first and foremost rule of thumb about web scraping is that you have to make your efforts as inconspicuous as possible. This way you will not arouse suspicion and negative behavior from your target websites. To this end, you need a well-designed web scraping program with a human touch. Such a program can operate in flexible ways so as to not alert website owners through the usual traffic criteria used to spot scraping tools.

Web scraping for ecommerce data extraction

Some of the measures that you can implement to ensure that you steer clear of common web scraping traps are –

•    The first thing that you need to do is to ascertain if a particular website that you are trying to scrape has any particular dislike towards web scraping tools. If you see any indication in their terms and conditions, tread cautiously and stop scraping their website if you receive any notification regarding their lack of approval. Being polite and honest can help you get away with a lot.

•    Try and minimize the load on every single website that you visit for scraping. Putting a high load on websites can alert them towards your intentions and often might cause them to develop a negative attitude. To decrease the overall load on a particular website, there are many techniques that you can employ.

•    Start by caching the pages that you have already crawled to ensure that you do not have to load them again.

•    Also store the URLs of crawled pages.

•    Take things slow and do not flood the website with multiple parallel requests that put a strain on their resources.

•    Handle your scraping in gentle phases and take only the content you require.

•    Your scraping spider should be able to diversify its actions, change its crawling pattern and present a polymorphic front to websites, so as not to cause an alarm and put them on the defensive.

•    Arrive at an optimum crawling speed, so as to not tax the resources and bandwidth of the target website. Use auto throttling mechanisms to optimize web traffic and put random breaks in between page requests, with the lowest possible number of concurrent requests that you can work with.

•    Use multiple IP addresses for your scraping efforts, or take advantage of proxy servers and VPN services. This will help to minimize the danger of getting trapped and blacklisted by a website.

•    Be prepared to understand the respect the express wishes and policies of a website regarding web scraping by taking a good look at the target ‘robots.txt’ file. This file contains clear instructions on the exact pages that you are allowed to crawl, and the requisite intervals between page requests. It might also specify that you use a pre-determined user agent identification string that classifies you as a scraping bot. adhering to these instructions minimizes the chance of getting on the bad side of website owners and risking bans.

Use an advanced tool for web scraping which can store and check data, URLs and patterns. Whether your web scraping needs are confined to one domain or spread over many, you need to appreciate that many website owners do not take kindly to scraping. The trick here is to ensure that you maintain industry best practices while extracting data from websites. This prevents any incident of misunderstanding, and allows you a clear pathway to most of the data sources that you want to leverage for your requirements.

Hope this article helps in understanding the different traps and roadblocks that you might face during your web scraping endeavors. This will help you in figuring out smart, sensible ways to work around them and make sure that your experience remains smooth. This way, you can keep receiving the important information that you need with web scraping. Following these basic guidelines can help you prevent getting banned or blacklisted and stay in the good books of website owners. This will allow you continue with your web scraping activities unencumbered.

Source:https://www.promptcloud.com/blog/some-traps-to-avoid-in-web-scraping/

Pick the top data extraction services for your needs

Data extraction has changed the way companies gather the information that they require. Long gone are the days when company dedicated entire teams to the gathering and organization of data, and instead they have come to use automated web data extraction software solutions. These solutions are faster, cheaper, and produce the result that you want in an easy manner.

How can web data extraction software help you?

There are virtually unlimited data on the internet, and you can have access to anything as long as it is in the public domain. But finding this information on your own can be one of the biggest challenges you can ever face. Collecting information on something as simple as product descriptions for an eCommerce store can take months and you still might not have complete information. No matter what field or topic, if information about it is available online, web data extraction software will find it.

Typical uses of data extraction service

There are many instances when a web data extraction service is the only sure way to get the amount of data that you require. The quality extraction software can also ensure a high level of quality in this data, and provide you the information that you require at the best prices:

•     Get the latest updates on classified websites in your region or area of interest. You can even have the data extraction customized to collect only emails or phone numbers.
•     Extract all useful information from online directories and yellow pages
•     Get every contact information that can be found on a website in the shortest possible time
•     Keep up with the job market, and get all the latest vacancies as soon as they are updated online.
•     Use the web data extraction software to generate viable business leads for you. Point it in the right direction and let it forward all relevant information to you immediately
•     Keep abreast of all the policy changes for your township, city, or country by monitoring updates on the official websites for the related organizations.
•     Follow updates from key people in your industry by extracting all the updates that they make on their social media profiles.
•     Download entire websites and have them available locally whenever you need them
•     Get web bots that not only index all the websites which you are trying to target, but also help you get access to everything that is stored on them
•     Get business intelligence that it critical to your growth in a timely and highly cost efficient manner.

There is simply too much that is possible when you make use of web data extraction services. The power that they put at your fingertips is impressive. You get complete control, and can put in highly specific requests. In fact, you can focus your data extraction efforts by websites and get tools that are designed specifically for a website. With options like LinkedIn Scraper, Google Maps Scraper and Facebook scraper available, you will never face any data shortage problems.

Websitedatascraping.com is enough capable to web data scraping, website data scraping, web scraping services, website scraping services, data scraping services, product information scraping and yellowpages data scraping.

Internet Data Mining - How Does it Help Businesses?

Internet has become an indispensable medium for people to conduct different types of businesses and transactions too. This has given rise to the employment of different internet data mining tools and strategies so that they could better their main purpose of existence on the internet platform and also increase their customer base manifold.

Internet data-mining encompasses various processes of collecting and summarizing different data from various websites or webpage contents or make use of different login procedures so that they could identify various patterns. With the help of internet data-mining it becomes extremely easy to spot a potential competitor, pep up the customer support service on the website and make it more customers oriented.

There are different types of internet data_mining techniques which include content, usage and structure mining. Content mining focuses more on the subject matter that is present on a website which includes the video, audio, images and text. Usage mining focuses on a process where the servers report the aspects accessed by users through the server access logs. This data helps in creating an effective and an efficient website structure. Structure mining focuses on the nature of connection of the websites. This is effective in finding out the similarities between various websites.

Also known as web data_mining, with the aid of the tools and the techniques, one can predict the potential growth in a selective market regarding a specific product. Data gathering has never been so easy and one could make use of a variety of tools to gather data and that too in simpler methods. With the help of the data mining tools, screen scraping, web harvesting and web crawling have become very easy and requisite data can be put readily into a usable style and format. Gathering data from anywhere in the web has become as simple as saying 1-2-3. Internet data-mining tools therefore are effective predictors of the future trends that the business might take.

If you are interested to know something more on Web Data Mining and other details, you are welcome to the Screen Scraping Technology site.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Internet-Data-Mining---How-Does-it-Help-Businesses?&id=3860679

Why Online Coverage Matters

To track online coverage is not just a fad these days. It is one of the tools that everyone can use to maintain a good image; monitor responses from guests or clients; and sell your ideas, products or services. It is one of the innovations of the computer age that has really made online presence a very strategic place to gain success in business, research, and all other ventures that one can think about.

The benefits that tracking online brings can never be measured by money because it in itself is an investment that no one can steal from you. You control it and you make good things happen to you and your business beyond your expectations.

Maintain a Good Image

A good image is something everyone works hard to achieve which with just one simple error of judgment or destructive criticism may ruin it in just a split second. As with all the best efforts you put on yourself to look good and attractive, you should also exert time and energy to make your online presence appealing and pleasing to all viewers regardless of age, nationality, and preferences.

Maintaining online presence can be done by the owner him or herself if the company is easy enough to  single handy or you may need an expert to do it for you at a reasonable coast. If you do not know how to do it, you read a lot of instructional articles and blogs or you can research the providers who can do the job for you efficiently and effectively.

Source: http://www.loginworks.com/blogs/web-scraping-blogs/online-coverage-matters/

Safeguarding the Future Through Data Mining

Web scraping can be a powerful tool not only in business and research. In fact, it has the capacity to protect the future by its predicting power. You may find this declaration incredible; but data mining is indeed a tangible way of predicting future events and thus protecting life in the future.

With the thousands of years of existence on earth, humans are able to gather as much information and experience to have a glimpse of what is to come. With the cycles of changes in the environment and in the whole universe aside from the human behavior, so much can be learned and applied.

At least three major things can be determined by careful and diligent data mining. These are: future threats; future trends; and future tactics.

Future threats

According to reports, the US intelligence agencies have been using web extraction as a way of studying the present and past terrorism acts and personages to predict future terrorist events. This has been actively done since the year 2010.

Data is gathered about a known terrorist such as: his activities; his contacts; his routines; the places he frequents; and other related information. These data are analyzed and classified. Any suspicious activities as well as unusual contact are monitored closely. Through these stored data and monitoring processes, any untoward activities can be precluded and preempted. You may say that terrorists can be using data mining too; and that is obviously possible. In this way, web scraping can also be used as a weapon for destruction. There is then a need for the government agencies to be very careful in protecting their data so that the enemies cannot retrieve them.

In the overall picture, you can just imagine how many lives, trauma, and damage can be prevented if future terrorist activities are prevented.

Moreover, climate change is another phenomenon that has already been predicted and is beginning to occur nowadays. Scientists have been studying the effects of global warming and environmental degradation through online data too. So much information drives and warning have been published by scholarly papers and by the experts but many of these have remained unheeded. Now that erratic weather conditions are happening, people can only regret and feel guilty that they are part of the cause of the problem.

However, it is not really too late to do some actions. People can avoid places where abnormal conditions are expected to happen; they can do some measures to protect themselves; and they can be informed ahead of time before anything catastrophic could happen.

Future trends

In relation to the predictions of possible threats, data extraction can also predict future trends. This is most helpful in businesses because they can be helped to produce items and employ strategies that will suit the expected patrons and clients.  Since history tends to repeat itself, data gathered in the past and present if studied judiciously and compared intelligently can bring in positive results.

Oftentimes, the companies that study their books as well as of those who have gone before them can gain more knowledge and expertise that will surely put them ahead of their contemporaries.

Future tactics

Naturally, along with knowing the possible events and trends in the future, strategies and ways to combat threats and cope with trends can also be predicted through web scraping.

Safeguarding the future is no longer a dream or wish. As early as today, experts can create equipment, structures, strategies, and even weapons to prevent any untoward incidents and collateral damage.

Studying the strengths and weaknesses of the past and present plans, procedures, and tools can lead to better technologies and techniques. The future can be a better and safer place if people can learn from the mistakes of the past and go from good to better.

The statement: “The best is yet to come,” will finally be realized if proper management of data and information collected and analyzed through web scraping will be conducted.

Bright future

Looking at the horizon, one can always expect the sun to shine and bring in a bright day. This same positive expectation for the future is indeed possible. Thanks to data mining; life can be handled more securely and precisely.

It does not mean that humans have become gods. It only proves that a person’s talents and skills, when used properly can make his/her future brighter and more successful. On the other hand, carelessness and lack of sensibilities to other people and the environment can surely bring in future doom.

Everything is laid bare and you are given the chance to handle the present with enough wisdom and capabilities. Although the world is too big to be understood and there is still a huge field of knowledge to be conquered, life can surely go on positively.

Source:http://www.loginworks.com/blogs/web-scraping-blogs/257-safeguarding-the-future-through-data-mining/