An Easy Way For Data Extraction

An Easy Way For Data Extraction

There are so many data scraping tools are available in internet. With these tools you can you download large amount of data without any stress. From the past decade, the internet revolution has made the entire world as an information center. You can obtain any type of information from the internet. However, if you want any particular information on one task, you need search more websites. If you are interested in download all the information from the websites, you need to copy the information and pate in your documents. It seems a little bit hectic work for everyone. With these scraping tools, you can save your time, money and it reduces manual work.

The Web data extraction tool will extract the data from the HTML pages of the different websites and compares the data. Every day, there are so many websites are hosting in internet. It is not possible to see all the websites in a single day. With these data mining tool, you are able to view all the web pages in internet. If you are using a wide range of applications, these scraping tools are very much useful to you.

The data extraction software tool is used to compare the structured data in internet. There are so many search engines in internet will help you to find a website on a particular issue. The data in different sites is appears in different styles. This scraping expert will help you to compare the date in different site and structures the data for records.

And the web crawler software tool is used to index the web pages in the internet; it will move the data from internet to your hard disk. With this work, you can browse the internet much faster when connected. And the important use of this tool is if you are trying to download the data from internet in off peak hours. It will take a lot of time to download. However, with this tool you can download any data from internet at fast rate.There is another tool for business person is called email extractor. With this toll, you can easily target the customers email addresses. You can send advertisement for your product to the targeted customers at any time. This the best tool to find the database of the customers.

However, there are some more scraping tolls are available in internet. And also some of esteemed websites are providing the information about these tools. You download these tools by paying a nominal amount.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?An-Easy-Way-For-Data-Extraction&id=3517104

How to scrape search results from search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo

How to scrape search results from search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo

Search giants like Google, Yahoo and Bing made their empire on scraping others content. However, they don’t want you to scrape them. How ironic, isn’t it?

Search engine performance is a very important metric all digital marketers want to measure and improve. I’m sure you will be using some great SEO tools to check how your keywords perform. All great SEO tool comes with a search keyword ranking feature. The tools will tell you how your keywords are performing in google, yahoo bing etc.

 How will you get data from search engines If you want to build a keyword ranking app?

 These search engines have API’s but the daily query limit is very low and not useful for the commercial purpose. The only solution is to scrape search results. Search engine giants obviously know this :). Once they know that you are scraping, they will  block your IP, Period!

 How do Search engines detect bots?

 Here are the common methods of detection of bots.

* IP address: Search engines can detect if there are too many requests coming from a single IP. If a high amount of traffic is detected, they will throw a captcha.

 * Search patterns: Search engines match traffic patterns to an existing set of patterns and if there is huge variation, they will classify this as a bot.

 If you don’t have access to sophisticated technology, it is impossible to scrape search engines like google, Bing or Yahoo.

 How to avoid detection

There are some things you can do to  avoid detection.

    Scrape slowly and don’t try to squeeze everything at once.
    Switch user agents between queries
    Scrape randomly and don’t follow the same pattern
    Use intelligent IP rotations
    Clear Cookies after each IP change or disable them completely

Thanks for reading this blog post.

Source: http://blog.datahut.co/how-to-scrape-search-results-from-search-engines-like-google-bing-and-yahoo/

Outsource Data Mining Services to Offshore Data Entry Company

Outsource Data Mining Services to Offshore Data Entry Company

Companies in India offer complete solution services for all type of data mining services.

Data Mining Services and Web research services offered, help businesses get critical information for their analysis and marketing campaigns. As this process requires professionals with good knowledge in internet research or online research, customers can take advantage of outsourcing their Data Mining, Data extraction and Data Collection services to utilize resources at a very competitive price.

In the time of recession every company is very careful about cost. So companies are now trying to find ways to cut down cost and outsourcing is good option for reducing cost. It is essential for each size of business from small size to large size organization. Data entry is most famous work among all outsourcing work. To meet high quality and precise data entry demands most corporate firms prefer to outsource data entry services to offshore countries like India.

In India there are number of companies which offer high quality data entry work at cheapest rate. Outsourcing data mining work is the crucial requirement of all rapidly growing Companies who want to focus on their core areas and want to control their cost.

Why outsource your data entry requirements?

Easy and fast communication: Flexibility in communication method is provided where they will be ready to talk with you at your convenient time, as per demand of work dedicated resource or whole team will be assigned to drive the project.

Quality with high level of Accuracy: Experienced companies handling a variety of data-entry projects develop whole new type of quality process for maintaining best quality at work.

Turn Around Time: Capability to deliver fast turnaround time as per project requirements to meet up your project deadline, dedicated staff(s) can work 24/7 with high level of accuracy.

Affordable Rate: Services provided at affordable rates in the industry. For minimizing cost, customization of each and every aspect of the system is undertaken for efficiently handling work.

Outsourcing Service Providers are outsourcing companies providing business process outsourcing services specializing in data mining services and data entry services. Team of highly skilled and efficient people, with a singular focus on data processing, data mining and data entry outsourcing services catering to data entry projects of a varied nature and type.

Why outsource data mining services?

360 degree Data Processing Operations
Free Pilots Before You Hire
Years of Data Entry and Processing Experience
Domain Expertise in Multiple Industries
Best Outsourcing Prices in Industry
Highly Scalable Business Infrastructure
24X7 Round The Clock Services

The expertise management and teams have delivered millions of processed data and records to customers from USA, Canada, UK and other European Countries and Australia.

Outsourcing companies specialize in data entry operations and guarantee highest quality & on time delivery at the least expensive prices.

Herat Patel, CEO at 3Alpha Dataentry Services possess over 15+ years of experience in providing data related services outsourced to India.

Visit our Facebook Data Entry profile for comments & reviews.

Our services helps to convert any kind of  hard copy sources, our data mining services helps to collect business contacts, customer contact, product specifications etc., from different web sources. We promise to deliver the best quality work and help you excel in your business by focusing on your core business activities. Outsource data mining services to India and take the advantage of outsourcing and save cost.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Outsource-Data-Mining-Services-to-Offshore-Data-Entry-Company&id=4027029

Scraping Yelp Data and How to use?

Scraping Yelp Data and How to use?

We get a lot of requests to scrape data from Yelp. These requests come in on a daily basis, sometimes several times a day. At the same time we have not seen a good business case for a commercial project with scraping Yelp.

We have decided to release a simple example Yelp robot which anyone can run on Chrome inside your computer, tune to your own requirements and collect some data. With this robot you can save business contact information like address, postal code, telephone numbers, website addresses etc.  Robot is placed in our Demo space on Web Robots portal for anyone to use, just sign up, find the robot and use it.

How to use it:

    Sign in to our portal here.
    Download our scraping extension from here.
    Find robot named Yelp_us_demo in the dropdown.
    Modify start URL to the first page of your search results. For example: http://www.yelp.com/search?find_desc=Restaurants&find_loc=Arlington,+VA,+USA
    Click Run.
    Let robot finish it’s job and download data from portal.

Some things to consider:

This robot is placed in our Demo space – therefore it is accessible to anyone. Anyone will be able to modify and run it, anyone will be able to download collected data. Robot’s code may be edited by someone else, but you can always restore it from sample code below. Yelp limits number of search results, so do not expect to scrape more results than you would normally see by search.

In case you want to create your own version of such robot, here it’s full code:

// starting URL above must be the first page of search results.
// Example: http://www.yelp.com/search?find_desc=Restaurants&find_loc=Arlington,+VA,+USA

steps.start = function () {

   var rows = [];

   $(".biz-listing-large").each (function (i,v) {
     if ($("h3 a", v).length > 0)
       {
        var row = {};
        row.company = $(".biz-name", v).text().trim();
        row.reviews =$(".review-count", v).text().trim();
        row.companyLink = $(".biz-name", v)[0].href;
        row.location = $(".secondary-attributes address", v).text().trim();
        row.phone = $(".biz-phone", v).text().trim();
        rows.push (row);
      }
   });

   emit ("yelp", rows);
   if ($(".next").length === 1) {
     next ($(".next")[0].href, "start");
   }
 done();
};

Source: https://webrobots.io/scraping-yelp-data/

Things to take care while doing Web Scraping!!!

Things to take care while doing Web Scraping!!!

In the present day and age, web scraping word becomes most popular in data science. Basically web scraping is extracting the information from the websites using pre-written programs and web scraping scripts. Many organizations have successfully used web site scraping to build relevant and useful database that they use on a daily basis to enhance their business interests. This is the age of the Big Data and web scraping is one of the trending techniques in the data science.

Throughout my journey of learning web scraping and implementing many successful scraping projects, I have come across some great experiences we can learn from.  In this post, I’m going to discuss some of the approaches to take and approaches to avoid while executing web scraping.

User Proxies: Anonymously scraping data from websites

One should not scrape website with a single IP Address. Because when you repeatedly request the web page for web scraping, there is a chance that the remote web server might block your IP address preventing further request to the web page. To overcome this situation, one should scrape websites with the help of proxy servers (anonymous scraping). This will minimize the risk of getting trapped and blacklisted by a website. Use of Proxies to hide your identity (network details) to remote web servers while scraping data. You may also use a VPN instead of proxies to anonymously scrape websites.

Take maximum data and store it.

Do not follow “process the web page as it comes from the remote server”. Instead take all the information and store it to disk. This approach will be useful when your scraping algorithm breaks in the middle. In this case you don’t have to start scraping again. Never download the same content more than once as you are just wasting bandwidth. Try and download all content to disk in one go and then do the processing.

Follow strict rules in parsing:

Check various rules while parsing the information from the web site. For example if you expect a value to be a date then check that it’s really a date. This may greatly improve the quality of information. When you get unexpected data, then the algorithm need to be changed accordingly.

Respect Robots.txt

Robots.txt specifies the set of rules that should be followed by web crawlers and robots. I strongly advise you to consider and adjust your crawler to fully respect robots.txt. Robots.txt contains instructions on the exact pages that you are allowed to crawl, user-agent, and the requisite intervals between page requests. Following to these instructions minimizes the chance of getting blacklisted and banned from website owner.

Use XPath Smartly

XPath is a nice option to select elements of the HTML document more flexibly than CSS Selectors.  Be careful about HTML structure change through page to page so one xpath you made may be failed to extract data on another page due to changes in HTML structure.

Obey Website TOC:

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

Test sample scrape and verify the data with actual scrape

Once you are done with web scraping project set up, you need to test it for sometimes. Check the extracted data. If something is not good, find out the cause and make changes accordingly and finally come to a perfect web scraping project.

Source: http://webdata-scraping.com/things-take-care-web-scraping/

Benefits of Ruby over Python & R for Web Scraping

Benefits of Ruby over Python & R for Web Scraping

In this data driven world, you need to be constantly vigilant, as information and key data for an organization keeps changing all the while. If you get the right data at the right time in an efficient manner, you can stay ahead of competition. Hence, web scraping is an essential way of getting the right data. This data is crucial for many organizations, and scraping technique will help them keep an eye on the data and get the information that will benefit them further.

Web scraping involves both crawling the web for data and extracting the data from the page. There are several languages which programmers prefer for web scraping, the top ones are Ruby, Python & R. Each language has its own pros and cons over the other, but if you want the best results and a smooth flow, Ruby is what you should be looking for.

Ruby is very good at production deployments and using Ruby, Redis & Chef have proven to be a great combination. String manipulation in Ruby is very easy because it is based on Perl syntax. Also, Ruby is great for analyzing web pages using  one of the very powerful gems called Nokogiri. Nokogiri is much easier to use as compared to other packages and libraries used by R and Python respectively. Nokogiri can deal with broken HTML / HTML fragments easily. Ruby also has many extensions, such as Sanitize and Loofah, that can help clean up broken HTML.

Python programmers widely use a library called Beautiful Soup for pulling data out of HTML & XML files. It works with your favorite parser to provide idiomatic ways of navigating, searching, and modifying the parse tree. It commonly saves programmers hours or days of work. R programmers have a new package called rvest that makes it easy to scrape data from html web pages, by libraries like beautiful soup. It is designed to work with magrittr so that you can express complex operations as elegant pipelines composed of simple, easily understood pieces.

To help you understand it more effectively, below is a comprehensive infographic for the same.

Ruby is far ahead of Python & R for cloud development and deployments.  The Ruby Bundler system is just great for managing and deploying packages from Github. Using Chef, you can start up and tear down nodes on EC2, at will, and monitor for failures,  scale up or down, reset your IP addresses, etc. Ruby also has great testing frameworks like Fakeweb and Capybara, making it almost trivial to build a great suite of unit tests and to include advanced features, like crawling  and scraping using webkit / selenium. 

The only disadvantage to Ruby is lack of machine learning and NLP toolkits, making it much harder to emulate the capacity of a tool like Pattern.  It can still be done, however, since most of the heavy lifting can be done asynchronously using Unix tools like liblinear or vowpal wabbit.

Conclusion

Each language has its plus point and you can pick the one which you are most comfortable with. But if you are looking for smooth web scraping experience, then Ruby is the best option. That has been our choice too for years at PromptCloud for the best web scraping results. If you have any further questions about this, then feel free to get in touch with us.

Source: https://www.promptcloud.com/blog/benefits-of-ruby-for-web-scraping

How Web Scraping can Help you Detect Weak spots in your Business

How Web Scraping can Help you Detect Weak spots in your Business

Business intelligence is not a new term. Businesses have always been employing experts for analysing the progress, market and industry trends to keep their growth graph going up. Now that we have big data and the tool to gather this data – Web scraping, business intelligence has become even more fruitful. In fact, business intelligence has become a necessary thing to survive now that the competition is fierce in every industry. This is the reason why most enterprises depend on web scraping solutions to gather the data relevant to their businesses. This data is highly insightful and dependable enough to make critical business decisions. Business intelligence from web scraping is definitely a game changer for companies as it can supply relevant and actionable data with minimal effort.

Most businesses have weak spots that are being overlooked or hidden from the plain sight. These weak spots, if left unnoticed can gradually result in the downfall of your company. Here is how you can use data acquired through web scraping to detect weak spots in your business and strengthen them.

Competitor analysis

Many a times, you can find out the flaws in your business by keeping a close watch on your competitors. Competitor analysis is something that we owe to web scraping as the level of competitive intelligence that you can derive from web scraping has never been achievable in the past. With crawling forums and social media sites where your target audience is, you can easily find out if your competitor is leveraging something you have overlooked. Competitor analysis is all about staying updated to each and every action by your competitors, so that you can always be prepared for their next strategic move. If your competitors are doing better than you, this data can be used to make a comparison between your business and theirs which would give you insights on where you lack.

Brand monitoring on Social media

With social media platforms acting like platforms where businesses and customers can interact with each other, the data available on these sites are increasingly becoming relevant to businesses. Any issues in your business operations will also reflect on your customer sentiments. Social media is a goldmine of sentiment data that can help you detect issues within your company. By analysing the posts that mention your brand or product on social media sites, you can identify what department of your company is functioning well and what isn’t.

For example, if you are an Ecommerce portal and many users are complaining about delivery issues from your company on social media, you might want to switch to a better logistics partner who does a better job. The ability to identify such issues at the earliest is extremely important and that’s where web scraping becomes a life saver. With social media scraping, monitoring your brand on social media is easy like never before and the chances of minor issues escalating to bigger ones is almost non-existent. Brand monitoring is extremely crucial if you are a business operating in the online space. Social media scraping solutions are provided by many leading web scraping companies, which totally eliminates the technical complications associated with the process for you.

Finding untapped opportunities

There are always new and untapped markets and opportunities that are relevant to your business. Finding them is not going to be an easy task with manual and outdated methods of research. Web scraping can fill this gap and help you find opportunities that your company can make use of to leverage your reach and progress. Sometimes, targeting the right audience makes all the difference that you’ve been trying to make. By using web crawling to find mentions of your relevant keywords on the web, you can easily stay updated on your niche and fill in to any new untapped markets. Web crawling for keywords is better explained in our previous blog.

Bottom line

It is not a cakewalk to stay ahead in the competition considering how competitive every industry has become in this digital age. It is crucial to find the weak spots and untapped opportunities of your business before someone else does. Of course, you can always use some help from the technology when you need it. Web scraping is clearly the best way to find and gather data that would help you figure these out. With web crawling solutions that can completely take care of this niche process, nothing is stopping you from using the data and insights that the web has in stock for your business.

Source: https://www.promptcloud.com/blog/web-scraping-detect-weak-spots-business