Web scraping (or data extraction) software is used to extract unstructured data from web pages. The data is then converted into a structured format that can be loaded into a database. Examples of unstructured data might be emails or other contact info, reports, URLs, etc. The data conversion process uses a variety of tools to assess structure, including text pattern matching, tabulation, or text analytics to comprehend the text and link it to other data.
The purpose of the data can be varied. Often tools are used to scrape product pricing and descriptions from ecommerce sites. Others may be dedicated to gathering data on job descriptions or salary, or job qualifications. Some tools can be used to scrape individual background checks. Any text of interest can be the subject of web scraping software.
Web scraping/data extraction software offers the following capabilities:
Scrape text from any website (Java, dynamic website, AJAX)
Codeless drag-and-drop web parsing interface for data selection
Track and monitor pricing data
Extract HTML code
Detect data streaming from IaaS, PaaS, and data centers
Optical character recognition (OCR) for extracting text
Scan multiple file formats (e.g. PDF, Word)
Extract images or diagrams from web pages
Scheduled, automated data extraction for selected targets
Export extracted data to a spreadsheet (e.g. Excel), database, or via API
Publish data to BI tools via API
Web scraping software is generally available on a subscription basis billed monthly or annually. Alternately many vendors offer managed services, and data on demand billed per API call. Pricing usually scales by volume of sites and data sources monitored, and number of web crawlers or agents available. Additional factors are number of scheduled scrapes, number of concurrent data extractions, and available extraction speed. High tier plans may also feature live support, and dedicated customer success.
HelpSystems Automate Desktop is a robotic process automation platform for desktop applications. According to the vendor, it offers the ability to automate almost any business process, and no technical expertise is required—IT managers and accountants alike can understand the drag-and-drop interfa...
Import.io is a website data importing or web scraping service, from the company of the same name headquartered in Saratoga. In February 2019 Import.io acquired Connnotate, another web scraping service. Connotate is now part of Import.io.
HelpSystems Automate Plus (formerly Automate BPA Server) is scalable enterprise automation software designed to go beyond basic robotic process automation to integrate frontend and backend automated workflows across an organization. The vendor says their robust business enterprise software featur...
Octoparse is a free web scraping software that turns unstructured or semi-structured data from any website into structured datasets, no coding needed. Extracted data can be exported as API, CSV, Excel, HTML, TXT, or into a database. It’s a free tool for data analysis and mining.Scraping the web o...
Able2Extract Professional, is a PDF converter, editor and creator. It is a powerful PDF suite that cuts down on the time spent dealing with PDFs and has been the long-time choice for increasing PDF productivity in the office.Able2Extract will let you convert scanned and native PDFs to more than 1...
Diffbot’s Article Extraction API is designed to retrieve every possible piece of data from a web page including: product specifications, full pricing details, SKU and other data; complete article text, author, date, title, comments, images and captions. The vendor says thousands of developers a...
JobsPikr is a job data delivery platform that extracts data directly from the company websites. It runs on top of automated crawlers powered by machine learning techniques to extract latest job listings directly from the career pages of company websites and delivers the data feed in the form of p...
Scrapinghub, an Irish company, offers the Scrapinghub platform (or Scrapy Cloud), a web scraping platform for deploying web crawlers and extracting data, available on a free plan with paid tiers supporting a greater number of concurrent crawls and RAM with storage.
Webhose.io, headquartered in Tel Aviv, offers their web content data feeds via APIs, providing data scraped from ecommerce, blogs, news, dark web (for threat detection) and other sites.
Hanzo, headquartered in the UK, supports ediscovery with their web content and social media scraping and archiving tool, supporting authentic, in-context data collection from online sources and databases.
JustLikeAPI is an advanced data crawling / data scraping API service enabling IT companies. The vendor provides review aggregation services to their clients to access, monitor, analyze and respond to reviews, or other data related to user accounts – across dozens of sites from a single place. Ac...
BlueBoard, from BlueBoard.io headquartered in France, is an ecommerce assortment tracking and competitor information collection tool.
