Scraping Online Communities for your Outreach Campaigns

Online communities offer a wealth of intelligence for blog owners and business owners alike.

Exploring the data within popular communities will help you to understand who the major influencers are, what content is popular and who are the key content aggregators within your niche.

This is all fair and well to talk about, but is it feasible to be manually sorting through online communities to find this information out? Probably not.

This is where data scraping comes in.

What is Scraping and What Can it do?

I’m not going to go into great detail on what data scraping actually means, but to simplify this, here’s a definition from the Wikipedia page:

    “Data scraping is a technique in which a computer program extracts data from human-readable output coming from another program.”

Let me explain this with a little example…

Imagine a huge community full of individuals within your industry. Each person within the community has a personal profile page that contains information about their interests, contact details, social profiles, etc.

If you were tasked with gathering all of this data on all of the individuals then you might start to hyperventilating at the thought of all the copy and pasting you’d need to do.

Well, an alternative is to scrape all of this content so that you can automate all of this process and easily export all of this information into a manageable, more consumable format in a matter of seconds. It’d be pretty awesome, right?

Luckily for you, I’m going to show you how to do just that!

The Example of Inbound.org

Recently, I wanted to gather a list of digital marketers that were fairly active on social media and shared a lot of content online within communities. These people were going to be some of my core targets to get content from the blog in front of.

To do this, I first found some active communities online where these types of individuals hang out. Being a digital marketer myself, this process was fairly easy and I chose Inbound.org as my starting place.

Scoping out Data Requirements

Each community is different and you’ll be able to gather varying information within each.

The place to look for this information is within the individual user profile pages. This is usually where the contact information or links to social media accounts are likely to be displayed.

For this particular exercise, I wanted to gather the following information:

    Full name
    Job title
    Company name and URL
    Location
    Personal website URL
    Twitter URL, handle and follower/following stats
    Google+ URL, follower count and list of contributor URLs
    Profile image URL
    Facebook URL
    LinkedIn URL

With all of this information I’ll be able to get a huge amount of intelligence about the community members. I’ll also have a list of social media accounts to add and engage with.
On top of this, with all the information on their websites and sites that they write for, I’ll have a wealth of potential link building prospects to work on.

Inbound.org Profiles

You’ll see in the above screenshot that a few of the pieces of data are available to see on the Inbound.org user profiles. We’ll need to get the other bits of information from the likes of Twitter and Google+, but this will all stem from the scraping of Inbound.org.

Sign Up To My Newsletter
Scraping the Data

The idea behind this is that we can set up a template based on one of the user profiles and then automate the data gathering across the rest of the profiles on the site.

This is where you’ll need to install the SEO Tools plugin for Excel (it’s free). If you’ve not used this plugin before, don’t worry – I’ve put together a full tutorial here.

Once you’ve installed the plugin, you’re good to go on the actual scraping side of things…

Quick Note: Don’t worry if you don’t have a good knowledge of coding – you don’t need it. All you’ll need is a very basic understanding of reading some code and some basic Excel skills.

To begin with, you’ll need to do a little Excel admin. Simply add in some column titles based around the data that you’re gathering. For example, with my example of Inbound.org, I had, ‘Name’, ‘Position’, ‘Company’, ‘Company URL’, etc. which you can see in the screenshot below. You’ll also want to add in a sample profile URL to work on building the template around.

spreadsheet admin

Now it’s time to start getting hands on with XPath.

How to Use XPathOnURL()

This handy little formula is made possible within Excel by the SEO Tools plugin. Now, I’m going to keep this very basic because there are loads of XPath tutorials available online that can go into the very advanced queries that are possible to use.

For this, I’m simply going to show you how to get the data we want and you can have a play around yourself afterwards (you can download the full template at the end of this post).

Here’s an example of an XPath query that gathers the name of the person within the profile that we’re scraping:

=XPathOnUrl(A2, "//*[@id='user-profile']/h2")

A2 is simply referencing the cell that contains the URL that we’re scraping. You’ll see in the screenshot above that this is Jason Acidre’s profile page.

The next part of the formula is the XPath.

What this essentially says is to scrape through the HTML to find a tag that has ‘user-profile’ id attached to it. This could be a div, span, a or whatever.

Once it’s found this tag, it then needs to look at the first h2 tag within this area and grab the text within it. This is Jason’s name, which you’ll see in the screenshot below of the code:

website code

Don’t be put off at this stage because you don’t need to go manually trawling through code to build these queries, there’s a much simpler way.

The easiest way to do this is by right-clicking on the element you want to scrape on the webpage (within Chrome); for example, on Inbound.org, this would be the profile name. Now click ‘Inspect element’.

inspect element

The developer tools window should now appear at the bottom of your browser (or in a separate window). Within that, you should see the element that you’ve drilled down on.

All you need to do now is right-click on it and press ‘Copy XPath’.

copy XPath

This will now copy the XPath code for your Excel formula to the clipboard. You’ll just need to add in the first part of the query, i.e. =XPathOnUrl(A2,

You can then paste in the copied XPath after this and add a closing bracket.

Note: When you use ‘Copy XPath’ it will wrap some parts of the code in double apostrophes (“) which you’ll need to change to single apostrophes. You’ll also need to wrap the copied XPath in double apostrophes.

Your finished code will look like this:

=XPathOnUrl(A2, "//*[@id='user-profile']/h2")

You can then apply this formula against any Inbound.org profile and it will automatically grab the user’s full name. Pretty good, right?

Check out the full video tutorial below that I’ve put together that talks you through this whole process:

[sws_blue_box box_size=””] Want more useful video tutorials? Subscribe to my YouTube channel now![/sws_blue_box]

XPath Examples for Grabbing Other Data

As you’re probably starting to see, this technique could be scaled across any website online. This makes big data much more attainable and gives you the kind of results that an expensive paid tool would offer without any of the cost – bonus!

Here’s a few more examples of XPath that you can use in conjunction with the SEO Tools plugin within Excel to get some handy information.

Twitter Follower Count

If you want to grab the number of followers for a Twitter user then you can use the following formula. Simply replace A2 with the Twitter profile URL of the user you want data on. Just a quick word of warning with this one; it looks like it’s really long and complicated, but really I’ve just used another Excel formula to snip of the text ‘followers’ from the end.

=RIGHT(XPathOnUrl(D57,"//li[@class='ProfileNav-item ProfileNav-item--followers']"),LEN(XPathOnUrl(D57,"//li[@class='ProfileNav-item ProfileNav-item--followers']"))-10)

Google+ Follower Count

Like with the Twitter follower formula, you’ll need to replace A2 with the full Google+ profile URL of the user you want this data for.

=XPathOnUrl(H67,"//span[@class='BOfSxb']")

List of ‘Contributor to’ URLs

I don’t think I need to tell you the value of pulling in a list of websites that someone contributes content to. If you do want to know then check out this post that I wrote.

This formula is a little more complex than the rest. This is because I’m pulling in a list of URLs as opposed to just one entity. This requires me to use the StringJoin function to separate all of the outputs with a comma (or whatever character you’d like).

Also, you may notice that there is an additional section to the XPath query, “href”. This pulls in the link within the specific code block instead of the text.

As you’ll see in the full Inbound.org scraper template that I’ve made, this is how I pull in the Twitter, Google+, Facebook and LinkedIn profile links.

You’ll want to replace A2 with the Google+ profile URL of the person you wish to gather data on.

=StringJoin(", ",XPathOnUrl(A2,"//a[@rel='contributor-to nofollow']","href"))

Twitter Profile Image URL

If you want to get a large version of someone’s Twitter profile image then I’ve got just the thing for you.

Again, you’ll just need to substitute A2 with their Twitter profile URL.

=XPathOnUrl(A2,"//*[@class='profile-picture media-thumbnail js-tooltip']","data-resolved-url-large")

Some Findings from the Data I’ve Gathered

With all big data sets will come some interesting findings. Here’s a few little things that I’ve found from the top 100 influential users on Inbound.org.

average followers chart

The chart above maps out the average number of followers that the top 100 users have on both Twitter (12,959) and Google+ (9,601). As well as this, it shows the average number of users that they follow on Twitter (1,363).

The next thing that I’ve looked at is the job titles of the top 100 users. You can see the most common occurrences of terms within the tag cloud below:

Job titlesFinally, I had a look through all of the domains listed within each of the top 100 Inbound.org users’ Google+ ‘contributor to’ sections and mapped out the most frequently mentioned sites.

Here’s the spread of domains that were the most popular to be contributed to:

domain frequency

It Doesn’t Stop There

As you’ve probably gathered, this can be scaled out across pretty much any community/forum/directory/website online.

With this kind of intelligence in your armoury, you’ll be able to gather more intelligence on your targets and increase the effectiveness of your outreach campaigns dramatically.

Also, as promised, you can download my full Inbound.org scraper template below:

[sdfile url=”http://www.matthewbarby.com/goodies/MatthewBarby-Inbound-Scraper.xlsx” redirect=”http://www.matthewbarby.com/thanks-downloading-inbound-scraper/”]

TL;DR

    Online communities hold valuable data on your target audiences – use it!

    Scale out your intelligence gathering by brushing up on your XPath.

    Download my Inbound.org scraper template and let it work its magic.

Source:http://www.matthewbarby.com/scraping-communities-with-xpath/

Web Data Extraction: driving data your way

Most businesses rely on the web to gather data such as product specifications, pricing information, market trends, competitor information, and regulatory details. More often than not, companies collect this data manually—a process that not only takes a significant amount of time, but also has the potential to introduce costly errors.

By automating data extraction, you're able to free yourself (and your pointer finger) from hours of copy/pasting, eliminate human errors, and focus on the parts of your job that make you feel great.

Web data extraction: What it is, why it's used, and how to get it right on an ongoing basis

Web data extraction, screen scraping, web harvesting—while these terms may have different connotations they all essentially point to the same thing: plucking data from the web and populating it in an organized way in another place for further analysis or more focused use. In an era where “big data” has become a commonplace concept, the appeal of web data extraction has grown; it’s an extremely efficient alternative to web browsing, and culls very specific data for a focused purpose.

How it's used

While each company’s needs vary, data extraction is often used for:

    Competitive intelligence, including web popularity, social perception, other sites linking to them, and placement of competitor advertisements

    Gathering financial data including stock market movement, product pricing, and more

    Creating continuity between price sheets and online websites, catalogs, or inventory databases

    Capturing product specifications like dimensions, color, and materials

    Pulling tabular data from multiple sources for in-depth analysis

Interestingly, some people even find that web data extraction can aid them in their leisure time as well, pulling data from blogs and websites that pertain to their hobbies or interests, and creating their own library of organized information on a topic. Perhaps, for instance, you want a list of all the designers that George Clooney wears (hey- we won’t question what you do in your free time). By using web scraping tools, you could automatically extract this type of data from, say, a fashion blogger who follows celebrity style, and create your own up-to-date shopping list of items.

How it's done

When you think of gathering data from the web, you should mentally juxtapose two different images: one of gathering a bucket of sand one grain at a time, and one of filling a bucket with a shovel that has the perfect scoop size to fill it completely in one sitting. While clearly the second method makes the most sense, the majority of web data extraction happens much like the first process--manually, and slowly.

Let’s take a look at a few different ways organizations extract data today.

The least productive way: manually

While this method is the least efficient, it’s also the most widespread. On the plus side, you need to learn absolutely nothing except “Ctrl+C/V” to use this method, which explains why it is the generally preferred method, despite the hours of time it can take. Imagine, for instance, managing a sales spreadsheet that keeps inventory up to date so that the information can be properly disseminated to a global sales team. Not only does it take a significant amount of time to update the spreadsheet with information from, say, your internal database and manufacturer’s website, but information may change rapidly, leaving sales reps with inaccurate information regardless.

Finding someone in the organization with a talent for programming languages like Python

Generally, automating a task without dedicated automation software requires programming, and therefore an internal resource with a solid familiarity with programming languages to create the task and corresponding script. While most organizations do, in fact, have a resource in IT or engineering with this type of ability, it often doesn’t seem like a worthy time investment for that person to derail the initiatives he or she is working on to automate web data extraction. Additionally, if companies do choose to automate using in-house resources, that person will find himself beholden to a continuing obligation, since he or she will need to adjust scripting if web objects and attributes change, disabling the task.

Outsourcing via Elance or oDesk

Unless there is a dedicated resource ready to automate and maintain data extraction processes (and most organizations wouldn’t necessarily choose to use their in-house employee time this way), companies might turn to outsourcing companies such as Elance or oDesk to hire contract help. While this is an effective way to automate a task using a resource that has a level of acumen in automation, it represents an additional cost--be it one time or on a regular basis as data extraction requirements change or increase.

Using Excel web queries

Since more often than not, data extracted from the web is often populated into an Excel spreadsheet, it’s no wonder that Excel includes web query tools expressly for that purpose. These tools are particularly useful in pulling tabular data from a website (such as product specifications, legal codes, stock prices, and a host of other information) and automatically pushing the data into a spreadsheet. Excel queries do have limitations and a learning curve, however, particularly when creating dynamic web queries. And clearly, if you’re hoping to populate the information in other sources, such as external databases, there is yet another level of difficulty to navigate.

How automation simplifies web data extraction

Culling web data quickly

Using automation is the simplest way to extract web data. As you execute the steps necessary to perform the task one time, a macro recorder captures each action, automatically generates an easily-editable script, and lets you specify how often you would like to repeat the task, and at what speed.

Maintaining the highest level of accuracy

With humans copy/pasting data, or comparing between multiple screens and entering data manually into a spreadsheet, you’re likely to run into accuracy issues (sometimes directly proportionate to the amount of time spent on the task and amount of coffee in the office!) Automation software ensures that “what you see is what you get,” and that data is picked up from the web and put back down where you want it without a hitch.

Storing web data in your preferred format

Not only can you accurately transfer data with automation software, you can also ensure that it’s populated into spreadsheets or databases in the format you prefer. Rather than simply dumping the data into a spreadsheet, you can ensure that the right information is put into the proper column, row, field, and style (think, for instance, of the difference between writing a birth date as “03/13/1912” and “12/3/13”).

Simplifying data analysis

Automation software allows you to aggregate data from disparate sources or enormous stockpiles of structured or unstructured data in a way that makes sense for your business analysis needs. This way, the majority of employees in an organization can perform some level of analysis on their own, making it easier to surface information that informs business decisions.

Reacting to changes without a hitch

Because automation software is built to recognize icons, images, symbols, and other objects regardless of their position on a screen, it can automate processes in a self-perpetuating manner. For example, let’s say you automate data retrieval from a certain chart on a retailer’s website without automation software. If the retailer decides to move that object to another area of the screen, your task would no longer produce accurate results (or work at all), leaving you to make changes to the script (or find someone who can), or re-record the task altogether. With image recognition capabilities, however, the system “memorizes” the object itself, not merely its coordinates, so that the task can continue to run irrespective of changes.

The wide sweeping appeal of automation software

Companies often pick a comprehensive automation solution not only because of its ability to effectively automate any web data extraction task, but also because it goes beyond data extraction. Automation software can permeate into other areas of the business as well, making tasks such as application integration, data migration, IT processes, Excel automation, testing, and routine tasks such as launching applications or formatting files faster and more accurate. Because it requires no programming experience to use, adoption rates are higher and businesses get more “bang for their buck.”

Almost any organization can benefit from using automation software, particularly as they grow and scale. If you are looking to quit “moving grains of sand” and start claiming back time in your day, there are a few steps you can take:

 Watch a short video that shows how web data extraction is done with automation software

 Download a free trial and start reaping the benefits of downloading even just a couple of tasks today.

 See how tasks are automated with our short, step-by-step how-to-sheets (and then give it a try yourself!)

Source: https://www.automationanywhere.com/web-data-extraction

Outsourcing Data Mining is a Wise Business Decision

Most businesses nowadays have a large volume of raw data that is never processed, because of the lack of time or resources. If your business is facing a similar situation, then you are missing out on valuable information. Without the right information, your company will be unable to make accurate business decisions.

The right information can play a key role in promoting the growth of your business. When unprocessed data is entered, filtered, classified and converted into a workable format, it can be used to maximize your profits, ameliorate your risks and run a seamless workflow.

Over the years, data mining has proved to be extremely useful in various industries, be it, healthcare, direct marketing, e-commerce, finance, customer relationship management or telecommunications. With the right information, companies have been able to make fast and effective business decisions.

Why outsource data mining?

Data mining requires the expertise of professional business and financial analysts who understand how to acquire important information from vast amounts of data. If data mining is done in-house, it can become expensive and time consuming. It can also shift your focus away from core business activities. Outsourcing data mining on the other hand is more fast, cost-effective and can give you access to professional services.

4 commonly outsourced data mining functions

Most companies outsource one or more of the following data mining functions to India:

1. Data congregation: Data is extracted from various web pages and websites, by using methods like web and screen scraping. The collected data is then entered into a database.

2. Contact data collection: Different websites are searched and information concerning contacts is collected.

3. E-commerce data: Data about varied online stores are collected, taking into account information about prices, discounts and products.

4. Data about competitors: Data about business competitors are collected to help a company gauge itself against its competition. With such valuable data, you can effectively re-design your marketing strategy and pricing matrix.

8 advantages of outsourcing data mining to India

With data mining out of your hands, your business can make huge savings in terms of time, money and infrastructure. The following are some of the benefits that you can leverage by outsourcing data mining to India:

    Get qualified and highly skilled data mining experts to work for you at an extremely affordable cost

    Be assured of the quality of information, as Indian data entry companies only extract information from reliable websites and databases

    Save on the cost of investing on the latest data mining software and technology, as your Indian service provider will be making these investments

    Get your data processed within a short turnaround time of 3,6 or 12 hours as Indian data mining companies can provide efficient data mining within a few hours

    When compared to in-house data mining, outsourcing data mining can be a lot cheaper and also bring you better results

    Stay assured about the complete privacy, security and confidentiality of your valuable data as Indian data mining companies use the latest technology to ensure 100% safety

    Get access to data with a wide market coverage as your Indian data mining provider will be serving many business with varied data mining needs

    Improve your overall productivity and generate more profits by making informed decisions about your business

Have you outsourced data mining before? If yes, which data mining service did you outsource? Did you find outsourcing more advantageous that in-house data mining. Let us know.

Source: http://blog.flatworldsolutions.com/outsourcing-data-mining-is-a-wise-business-decision/

Online Data Entry & Web Scraping Services

To operate any type of organization smoothly, it is essential to have precise data that is accurate and reliable. When your business expands, data entry on an ongoing basis is a tedious job. It’s a very time consuming task that can often distract employees focusing on core business areas.

Webpop offers all forms of online data entry services that are quick and accurate. We provide data entry services across all verticals that can be completely customized to your business requirements.

Database Population Services

Database population involves content collection from various database sources. This requires a lot of attention to detail, dedication and awareness and can prove a formidable task, especially for websites that largeley depend on it.

Webpop offer a quick and efficient database population service that helps relieve the stress from an extremely laborius task and leaves you more time to focus on more important aspects of your business. By investing just a fraction of the cost, you can outsource your database population tasks to us.

Web Scraping Services

Webpop have been assisting clients in searching, extracting and collecting data from the web for the past 5 years using the latest techniques in web scraping techology. We can scrape all types of information from a variety of sources such as websites, blogs, online directories, e-commerce websites and podcasts to name a few. We use a varied selection of automated and manual web scraping technologies to extract, gather and collect all of the required data you require from any chosen website(s) on the World Wide Web.

We can simplify the whole process from collection to population, converting your scraped data in to structured formats that are applicable to your website. This can be offered as a one time service or an ongoing basis that will assist you in constantly keeping your website’s content fresh and up to date. We can crawl competitors websites, gather sales leads, product details, pricing methodologies and also creat custom campaigns to suit your project’s requirements.

Over the years Webpop has grown from strength-to-strength by providing all types of data entry, database population and web scraping services. All of our data entry services are performed with care, due dilligence and attention to detail. We enjoy a challenge and pride ourselves on delivering results whilst working on precarious projects that require precision and total commitment.

Source:http://www.webpopdesign.com/services/data-entry/

Kimono Is A Smarter Web Scraper That Lets You “API-ify” The Web, No Code Required

A new Y Combinator-backed startup called Kimono wants to make it easier to access data from the unstructured web with a point-and-click tool that can extract information from webpages that don’t have an API available. And for non-developers, Kimono plans to eventually allow anyone track data without needing to understand APIs at all.

This sort of smarter “web scraper” idea has been tried before, and has always struggled to find more than a niche audience. Previous attempts with similar services like Dapper or Needlebase, for example, folded. Yahoo Pipes still chugs along, but it’s fair to say that the service has long since been a priority for its parent company.

But Kimono’s founders believe that the issue at hand is largely timing.

“Companies more and more are realizing there’s a lot of value in opening up some of their data sets via APIs to allow developers to build these ecosystems of interesting apps and visualizations that people will share and drive up awareness of the company,” says Kimono co-founder Pratap Ranade. (He also delves into this subject deeper in a Forbes piece here). But often, companies don’t know how to begin in terms of what data to open up, or how. Kimono could inform them.

Plus, adds Ranade, Kimono is materially different from earlier efforts like Dapper or Needlebase, because it’s outputting to APIs and is starting off by focusing on the developer user base, with an expansion to non-technical users planned for the future. (Meanwhile, older competitors were often the other way around).

The company itself is only a month old, and was built by former Columbia grad school companions Ranade and Ryan Rowe. Both left grad school to work elsewhere, with Rowe off to Frog Design and Ranade at McKinsey. But over the nearly half-dozen or so years they continued their careers paths separately, the two stayed in touch and worked on various small projects together.

One of those was Airpapa.com, a website that told you which movies were showing on your flights. This ended up giving them the idea for Kimono, as it turned out. To get the data they needed for the site, they had to scrape data from several publicly available websites.

“The whole process of cleaning that [data] up, extracting it on a schedule…it was kind of a painful process,” explains Rowe. “We spent most of our time doing that, and very little time building the website itself,” he says. At the same time, while Rowe was at Frog, he realized that the company had a lot of non-technical designers who needed access to data to make interesting design decisions, but who weren’t equipped to go out and get the data for themselves.

With Kimono, the end goal is to simplify data extraction so that anyone can manage it. After signing up, you install a bookmarklet in your browser, which, when clicked, puts the website into a special state that allows you to point to the items you want to track. For example, if you were trying to track movie times, you might click on the movie titles and showtimes. Then Kimono’s learning algorithm will build a data model involving the items you’ve selected.

Screen Shot 2014-02-18 at 4.29.05 PM

Screen Shot 2014-02-18 at 4.29.27 PM

That data can be tracked in real time and extracted in a variety of ways, including to Excel as a .CSV file, to RSS in the form of email alerts, or for developers as a RESTful API that returns JSON. Kimono also offers “Kimonoblocks,” which lets you drop the data as an embed on a webpage, and it offers a simple mobile app builder, which lets you turn the data into a mobile web application.

Screen Shot 2014-02-18 at 4.29.50 PM

For developer users, the company is currently working on an API editor, which would allow you to combine multiple APIs into one.

So far, the team says, they’ve been “very pleasantly surprised” by the number of sign-ups, which have reached ten thousand*. And even though only a month old, they’ve seen active users in the thousands.

Initially, they’ve found traction with hardware hackers who have done fun things like making an airhorn blow every time someone funds their Kickstarter campaign, for instance, as well as with those who have used Kimono for visualization purposes, or monitoring the exchange rates of various cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and dogecoin. Others still are monitoring data that’s later spit back out as a Twitter bot.

Kimono APIs are now making over 100,000 calls every week, and usage is growing by over 50 percent per week. The company also put out an unofficial “Sochi Olympics API” to showcase what the platform can do.

The current business model is freemium based, with pricing that kicks in for higher-frequency usage at scale.

The Mountain View-based company is a team of just the two founders for now, and has initial investment from YC, YC VC and SV Angel.

Source:http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/18/kimono-is-a-smarter-web-scraper-that-lets-you-api-ify-the-web-no-code-required/

A Web Scraper’s Guide to Kimono

Being a frequent reader of Hacker News, I noticed an item on the front page earlier this year which read, “Kimono – Never write a web scraper again.” Although it got a great number of upvotes, the tech junta was quick to note issues, especially if you are a developer who knows how to write scrapers. The biggest concern was a non-intuitive UX, followed by the inability of the first beta version to extract data items from websites as smoothly as the demo video suggested.

I decided to give it a few months before I tested it out, and I finally got the chance to do so recently.

Kimono is a Y-Combinator backed startup trying to do something in a field where others have failed. Kimono is focused on creating APIs for websites which don’t have one, another term would be web scraping. Imagine you have a website which shows some data you would like to dynamically process in your website or application. If the website doesn’t have an API, you can create one using Kimono by extracting the data items from the website.

Is it Legal?

Kimono provides an FAQ section, which says that web scraping from public websites “is 100% legal” as long as you check the robots.txt file to see which URL patterns they have disallowed. However, I would advise you to proceed with caution because some websites can pose a problem.

A robots.txt is a file that gives directions to crawlers (usually of search engines) visiting the website. If a webmaster wants a page to be available on search engines like Google, he would not disallow robots in the robots.txt file. If they’d prefer no one scrapes their content, they’d specifically mention it in their Terms of Service. You should always look at the terms before creating an API through Kimono.

An example of this is Medium. Their robots.txt file doesn’t mention anything about their public posts, but the following quote from their TOS page shows you shouldn’t scrape them (since it involves extracting data from their HTML/CSS).

    For the remainder of the site, you may not duplicate, copy, or reuse any portion of the HTML/CSS, JavaScipt, logos, or visual design elements without express written permission from Medium unless otherwise permitted by law.

If you check the #BuiltWithKimono section of their website, you’d notice a few straightforward applications. For instance, there is a price comparison API, which is built by extracting the prices from product pages on different websites.

Let us move on and see how we can use this service.

What are we about to do?

Let’s try to accomplish a task, while exploring Kimono. The Blog Bowl is a blog directory where you can share and discover blogs. The posts that have been shared by users are available on the feeds page. Let us try to get a list of blog posts from the page.

The simple thought process when scraping the data is parsing the HTML (or searching through it, in simpler terms) and extracting the information we require. In this case, let’s try to get the title of the post, its link, and the blogger’s name and profile page.

Source: http://www.sitepoint.com/web-scrapers-guide-kimono/

Future of Web Scraping

The Internet is large, complex and ever-evolving. Nearly 90% of all the data in the world has been generated over the last two years. In this vast ocean of data, how does one get to the relevant piece of information? This is where web scraping takes over.

Web scrapers attach themselves, like a leech, to this beast and ride the waves by extracting information form websites at will. Granted “scraping” doesn’t have a lot of positive connotations, yet it happens to be the only way to access data or content from a web site without RSS or an open API.

Future of Web Scraping

Web scraping faces testing times ahead. We outline why there may be some serious challenges to its future.

With rise in data, redundancies in web scraping are rising. No more is web scraping a domain of the coders; in fact, companies now offer customized scraping tools to clients which they can use to get the data they want. The outcome of everyone equipped to crawl, scrape, and extract, is unnecessary waste of precious man-power. Collaborative scraping could well heal this hurt. Here, where one web crawler does a broad scraping, the others scrape data off an API. An extension of the problem is that text retrieval attracts more attention than multimedia; and with websites becoming more complex, this enforces limited scraping capacity.

Easily, the biggest challenge to web scraping technology is Privacy concerns. With data freely available (most of it voluntary, much of it involuntary), the call for stricter legislation rings loudest. Unintended users can easily target a company and take advantage of the business using web scraping. The disdain with which “do not scrape” policies are treated and terms of usage violated, tells us that even legal restrictions are not enough. This begs to ask an age-old question: is scraping legal?

Is Crawling Legal? from PromptCloud

The flipside to this argument is that if technological barriers replace legal clauses, then web scraping will see a steady, and sure, decline. This is a distinct possibility since the only way scraping activity thrives is on the grid, and if the very means are taken away and programs no longer have access to website information, then web scraping by itself will be wiped out.

Building the Future

On the same thought is the growing trend of accepting “open data”. The open data policy, while long mused hasn’t been used at the scale it should be. The old way was to believe that closed data is the edge over competitors. But that mindset is changing. Increasingly, websites are beginning to offer APIs and embracing open data. But what’s the advantage of doing so?

Selling APIs not only brings in the money, but also is useful in driving back traffic to the sites! APIs are also a more controlled, cleaner way of turning sites into services. Steadily many successful sites like Twitter, LinkedIn etc. are offering access to their APIs with paid services and actively blocking scraper and bots.

Yet, beyond these obvious challenges, there’s a glimmer of hope for web scraping. And this is based on a singular factor: the growing need for data!

With Internet & web technology spreading, massive amounts of data will be accessible on the web. Particularly with increased adoption of mobile internet. According to one report, by 2020, the number of mobile internet users will hit 3.8 billion, or around half of the world’s population!

Since ‘big data’ can be both, structured & unstructured; web scraping tools will only get sharper and incisive. There is fierce competition between those who provide web scraping solutions. With the rise of open source languages like Python, R & Ruby, Customized scraping tools will only flourish bringing in a new wave of data collection and aggregation methods.

Source: https://www.promptcloud.com/blog/Future-of-Web-Scraping

3 Reasons to Up Your Web Scraping Game

If you aren’t using a machine-learning-driven intelligent Web scraping solution yet, here are three reasons why you might want to abandon that entry-level Web-scraping software or cut your high-cost script-writing approach.

    You need to keep an eye on a large number of web sources that get updated frequently.
    Understanding what’s changed is at least as critical as the data itself.
    You don’t want maintenance and scheduling to drag you down.

Here’s what an intelligent Web-scraping solution can deliver – and why:

1. Better data monitoring of an ever-shifting Web

If you need to keep a watch over hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of sites, an intelligent Web scraper is a must, because:

    It can scale – easily adding new websites, coordinating extraction routines, and automating the normalization of data across different websites.

    It can navigate and extract data from websites efficiently. Script-based approaches typically only can view a Web page in isolation, making it difficult to optimize navigation across unique pages of a targeted site. More intelligent approaches can be trained to bypass unnecessary links and leave a lighter footprint on the sites you need to access. And, they can monitor millions of precise Web data points quickly. This means you can monitor more pages on more sites with more frequent updates.

2. Critical alerts to Web data changes

A key sales executive suddenly drops off of the management page of your main competitor. That can mean big shakeup in the entire organization, which your sales team can jump on.

An intelligent Web scraper can alert you to this personnel shift because it can be set to monitor for just the changes; less powerful technologies or script-based approaches can’t. Whether you’re tracking price shifts, people moves, or product changes (or more) intelligent Web scraping delivers more profound insights.

3. Maintenance may become your biggest nightmare

You’ve purchased an entry-level tool and built out scrapers for a few hundred sites.  At first, everything seems fine. But, within weeks you begin to notice that your data is incomplete and not being updated as you’d expected. Why did your data deliveries disappear?

Reality is that these low-cost tools are simply not designed for mission-critical business applications – on the surface they look helpful and easy to use, but underneath the surface they are script-based and highly dependent upon the HTML of a website. But websites change, and entry-level web scraping tools are simply not engineered to adapt to those changes.

And, most of these tools are simply not designed for enterprise use. They have limited reporting, if any, so the only way to know whether they’re successfully completing their tasks is by finding gaps in the data – often when it’s too late.

An intelligent web scraping approach doesn’t rely upon the HTML of a web page. It uses machine learning algorithms which view the web the same way a user might. A typical reader doesn’t get confused when a font or color is changed on a website, and neither do these algorithms. But simple approaches to web scraping are highly dependent on the specific HTML to help it understand the content of a page. So, when websites have design changes (on average once every 18 months), the software fails.

While entry-level web scraping software can be an easy solution for simple, one-time web scraping projects, the scripts they generate are fragile and the resources required for tracking and maintenance can become overwhelming when you need to regularly extract data from multiple sites.

Case in point: Shopzilla assimilates data five times faster than outsourced Web scrapers

To demonstrate the power of intelligent Web scraping, here’s a real-life example from Shopzilla.  Shopzilla manages a premier portfolio of online shopping brands in the United States and Europe, connecting more than 40 million shoppers each month with millions of products from retailers worldwide. With the explosive growth of retail data on the Web, Shopzilla’s outsourced, custom-built approach, based on scripting, could not add the product lines of new retailers to its site in a timely fashion. It was taking up to two weeks to write the scripts needed to make a single site accessible.

By deploying Connotate’s intelligent web scraping platform on site, Shopzilla gained the ability to harness Web data’s rapid growth and keep up to date. Today, new sources are added in days, not weeks.  The platform continually monitors Web content from thousands of sites, delivering high volumes of data every day in a structured format. The result: 500 percent more data from new retailers. An added bonus: the company has reduced IT maintenance costs and its dependence on outsourced development timetables. Case in point: Deep competitor intelligence in two languages

A global manufacturer needed to monitor competitors’ technology improvements in a field where market leadership hinges on an ability to quickly leverage these advances. That meant accessing scholarly journals and niche sites in multiple languages. Using the Connotate solution, it was able to access highly-targeted, keyword-driven university and industry research journals and blogs in German and English that are hard to reach because they do not support RSS feeds. Our solution also incorporated semantic analysis to tag and categorize data and help identify new technologies and products not currently in the keyword list. The firm enhanced its competitive edge with the up-to-the-minute, precise data it needed.

Is your Web scraping intelligent enough?

See what intelligent agents through an automated Web data extraction and monitoring solution can bring to your business. Contact us and speak with one of experts.

Source:http://www.connotate.com/3-reasons-web-scraping-game-6579#.VGMjH2f4EuQ

Data Scraping vs. Data Crawling

One of our favorite quotes has been- ‘If a problem changes by an order, it becomes a totally different problem’ and in this lies the answer to- what’s the difference between scraping and crawling?

Crawling usually refers to dealing with large data-sets where you develop your own crawlers (or bots) which crawl to the deepest of the web pages. Data scraping on the other hand refers to retrieving information from any source (not necessarily the web). It’s more often the case that irrespective of the approaches involved, we refer to extracting data from the web as scraping (or harvesting) and that’s a serious misconception.

=>Below are some differences in our opinion- both evident and subtle

1.    Scraping data does not necessarily involve the web. Data scraping could refer to extracting information from a local machine, a database, or even if it is from the internet, a mere “Save as” link on the page is also a subset of the data scraping universe. Crawling on the other hand differs immensely in scale as well as in range. Firstly, crawling = web crawling which means on the web, we can only “crawl” data. Programs that perform this incredible job are called crawl agents or bots or spiders (please leave the other spider in spiderman’s world). Some web spiders are algorithmically designed to reach the maximum depth of a page and crawl them iteratively (did we ever say scrape?).

2.    Web is an open world and the quintessential practising platform of our right to freedom. Thus a lot of content gets created and then duplicated. For instance, the same blog might be posted on different pages and our spiders don’t understand that. Hence, data de-duplication (affectionately dedup) is an integral part of data crawling. This is done to achieve two things- keep our clients happy by not flooding their machines with the same data more than once, and saving our own servers some space. However, dedup is not necessarily a part of data scraping.

3.    One of the most challenging things in the web crawling space is to deal with coordination of successive crawls. Our spiders have to be polite with the servers that they hit so that they don’t piss them off and this creates an interesting situation to handle. Over a period of time, our intelligent spiders have to get more intelligent (and not crazy!) and learn to know when and how much to hit a server in order to crawl data on its web pages while complying with its politeness policies.

4.    Finally, different crawl agents are used to crawl different websites and hence you need to ensure they don’t conflict with each other in the process. This situation never arises when you intend to just scrape data.

On a concluding note, scraping represents a very superficial node of crawling which we call extraction and that again requires few algorithms and some automation in place.

Source:https://www.promptcloud.com/blog/data-scraping-vs-data-crawling/

Web Scraping the Solution to Data Harvesting

The internet is the number one information provider in the world and it is of course the largest in the same course. Web scraping is meant to extract and harvest useful information from the internet. It can be regarded as a multidisciplinary process that involves statistics, databases, data harvesting and data retrieval.

There has been noted a rapid expansion of the web and therefore causing an enormous growth of information. This has led to increased difficulty in the extraction of useful and potential information. Web scraping therefore confronts this problem by harvesting explicit information from a number of websites for knowledge discovery and easy access. It is important to realize that query interfaces of web databases are prone to sharing of same building blocks. It is therefore important to realize that the web offers unprecedented challenge and opportunity to data harvesting.

Source:http://www.loginworks.com/blogs/web-scraping-blogs/web-scraping-solution-data-harvesting/

Application of Web Data Mining in CRM

The process of improvising the customer relations and interactions and making them more amicable may be termed as Customer relationship management (CRM). Since web data mining is used in the utilization of the various modeling and data analysis methods in detecting given patterns and relationships in the data, it can be used as an effective tool in CRM. By the effectively using web data mining you are able to understand what your customers what.

It is important to note that web data mining can be used effectively in searching for the right and potential customers to be offered the right products at the right time. The result of this in any business is the increase in the revenue generated. This is made possible as you are able to respond to each customer in an effective and efficient way. The method further utilizes very few resources and can be therefore termed as an economical method.

In the next paragraphs we discuss the basic process of customer relationship management and its integration with web data mining service. The following are the basic process that should be used in understanding what your customers need, sending them the right offers and products, and reducing the resources used in managing your customers.

Defining the business objective. Web data mining can be used to define and inform your customers your business objective. By doing research you can be able to determine whether your business objective is communicated well to your customers and clients. Does your business objective take interest in the customers? Your business goal must be clearly outlined in your business CRM. By having a more precise and defined goal is the possible way of ensuring success in the customer relationship management.

Source:http://www.loginworks.com/blogs/web-scraping-blogs/application-web-data-mining-crm/