Know How to Scrape Website Data without Coding

ScrapingExpert – The web has become an integral part of our daily lives. Right from preparing a presentation to staging to preparing a report, we all need the web as a backup charger. However, simply extracting data and summarizing it according to our benefit does not really reduce the workload. It also does not make our data efficacious.

In this way the matter of the subject becomes less informative and scraping and summarizing the available content makes the job a tedious one. So, in order to make things a little sorted and loud and clear, the process of web scraping was henceforth invented as a rescue.

What is a web scraping?

This has been an age old practice in the history of computer science and its applications and the information systems. The process of Web scraping connotes the extracting of unstructured data or HTML codes and transforming them into structured data. This mechanism rearranges the data into spreadsheets and databases. Thus, in this way the data become reorganized and comprehensible.

Web scraping stations and how we scrape data;

Google Docs
Python

This is an open source programming language which thus enables us to find many libraries. But we need to search out the best of them for our own purpose. Thus, here we use 2 modules viz.

Beautiful soup

This is an amazing page for extracting data from the internet. We can even use filters to extract information from the web. The latest version for this is: Beautiful soup 4.

Let’s follow these steps to know how to extract information from Wikipedia through Beautiful soup.

Importing of required libraries.
Use the function – “prettify”, to view the nested HTML structure.
Working with the HTML tags

<tag>
<tag>.string
find_all(“a”)

Identifying the right table.
Extraction of information to transform into Dataframe.

Urllib2

This python module is used for URL extractions. The basic and redirect authentications and cookies are defined through URLs here.

Outwit Hub

On opening the hub we notice options on the left sidebar. In the meanwhile through these options we can extract all links on the web page including images too. Or we can simply use the Automators>Scrapers option for web scraping. Here we will find the sources for the WebPages. This option work as the source provider makers. When we get our earmarked information we can rearrange them in the “Marker before” (<li> / <td>) and “Marker after” (</li> / </td>) columns. After completing this hit the “Execute” button and the work is done.

Identification of html tags

The followings are HTML tags

<!DOCTYPE html>
<a>
<Table>
<Ul> (unordered) and <OL> (ordered).

Using of regular expressions

As regular expressions by a factor of 100 are much faster so they cannot be used in Beautiful soup. In fact the codes written in Beautiful soup are much robust in nature than the codes written in regular expressions. However in Outwit Hub regular expressions can be used.

Extraction of data has now become a day to day work. In this modern age life without internet is numb. So to make work less jeopardized reorganization is required hence web scraping is an amazing way out.

Beginners Guide To Learn Web Scraping

How to Choose the Best Web Scraping Services?

Today there are many web scraping services available on the market and specially designed data extraction tools are also available that target specific websites. All this has made extracting data from the internet a simple and easy process. Although a general web scrapper can do a decent job of extracting data, it is best to use a specialized web scraping service for certain websites.

What is Google Maps Scraper Software?

The Google Maps is an essential tool that millions access every day through their smartphone, tablet and computer devices.Now all the data is available on the internet, but it would take months for humans to sort and analyses all that data. A specialized extraction tool that can extract information from the Google Maps website is of great help.

Major benefits of Google Maps Scraper

Sorting out data

The data displayed on the screen on Google Maps is an elaborate mix match of people, addresses, sites and names. A proper extraction tool can isolate this jumbled data and separate them. The data can then be properly treated so that they can be easily viewed on a single screen dashboard.

Scraping professional listings

Another major advantage of using extraction services is that all the professional stores that are running in a particular area can be known easily. Hunting the map for a list of certain stores takes much more time than going through a list of stores in the area. Thus Google Maps Scraper Software makes the job of finding professional listings faster and easier.

Speed and accuracy

As already mentioned, it would take much longer for people to find places of interests in a given area when they are using a map compared to when they are using a list containing the sorted data. Extraction software complete a job at remarkable speed and the accuracy maintained throughout must also not be forgotten.

Collection of valuable geographical info

Many people and organizations are engaged in services in which they need accurate geographical and topographical information of a place quickly. The Google Maps Scraper software makes this possible by making this imperative data available. Using the automatic extraction features that is standard on most scraper software, valuable and precise data can be extracted rapidly.

Operational benefits

Most scraping tools offer a limited period during which clients can try it out before buying it. In some cases you can extract data from thousands of pages before you have to pay any money. Also extraction tools, save data in the CSV format. This means the data can be accessed using Excel on smartphone, tablet and computer devices.

Wide range of data can be collected

When you are using a quality data extraction tool, there are hardly any limits to the type and amount of data you can collect from Google Maps. Scrapping tools can easily collect names of professional businesses, their addresses, websites and even their opening hours with accuracy. The locations of a city, state or particular zip code can be expressed in terms of latitude and longitude in a matter of seconds.

Top 10 Web Scraping Software Provider

Advantages and Disadvantages of Web Scraping

How to Choose the Best Web Scraping Services?

Web scraping services provide an essential computer software facility by extracting different types of information from websites on the internet in a fast and efficient manner. There are several techniques of web scrapping that function automatically by scraping data from the internet. All the techniques involve the Hypertext Transfer Protocol or embedding the browser with which users surf the internet.

The Advantages of Web Scraping

The major advantages of web scraping services are explained in the following points.

Inexpensive – Web scraping services provide an essential service at a low cost. It is paramount that data is collected back from websites and analyzed so that the internet functions regularly. Web scraping services do the job in an efficient and budget friendly manner.
Easy to implement – Once a web scraping services deploys the proper mechanism to extract data, you are assured that you are not only getting data from a single page but from the entire domain. This means that with just a onetime investment, a lot of data can be collected.
Low maintenance and speed– One aspect that is often overlooked when installing new services is the maintenance cost. Long term maintenance costs can cause the project budget to spiral out of control. Thankfully, web scraping technologies need very little to no maintenance over a long period. Another characteristic that must also be mentioned is the speed with which web scraping services do their job. A job that could take a person week is finished in a matter of hours.
Accuracy – The web scraping services are not only fast, they are accurate too. Simple errors in data extraction can cause major mistakes later on. Accurate extraction of any type of data is thus very important.In websites that deal in pricing data, sales prices, real estate numbers or any kind of financial data, the accuracy is extremely important.

The Disadvantages of Web Scraping

The major disadvantages of web scraping services are explained in the following points.

Difficult to analyze – For anybody who is not an expert, the scraping processes are confusing to understand. Although this is not a major problem, but some errors could be fixed faster if it was easier to understand for more software developers.
Data analysis – The data that has been extracted will first need to be treated so that they can be easily understood. In certain cases, this might take a long time and a lot of energy to complete.
Time – It is common for new data extraction applications to take some time in the beginning as the software often has a learning curve. Sometimes web scraping services take time to become familiar with the core application and need to adjust to the scrapping language. This means that such services can take some days before they are up and running at full speed.
Speed and protection policies – Most web scrapping services are slower than API calls and another problem is the websites that do not allow screen scrapping. In such cases web scrapping services are rendered useless. Also, if the developer of the website decides to introduce some changes in the code, the scrapping service might stop working.

Scrape Website Data without Coding

Know How to Scrape Website Data without Coding

What is a web scraping?