My Experience in Choosing a Web Scraping Service

Recently I decided to outsource a web scraping project to another company. I typed “web scraping service” in Google, chose six services from the first two search result pages and sent the project specifications to all of them to get quotes. Eventually I decided to go another way and did not order the services, but my experience may be useful for others who want to entrust web scraping jobs to third party services.

If you are interested in price comparisons only and not ready to read the whole story just scroll down.

A list of web scraping services I sent my project to:

    www.datahen.com - Canadian web scraping service with nice web design
    webdata-scraping.com - Indian service by Keval Kothari
    www.iwebscraping.com - India based web scraping company (same as www.3idatascraping.com)
    scrapinghub.com - A scraping service founded by creators of Scrapy
    web-scraper.com - Yet another web scraping service
    grepsr.com - A scraping service that we already reviewed two years ago

Sending the request

All the services except scrapinghub.com have quite simple forms for the description of the project requirements. Basically, you just need to give your contact details and a project description in any form. Some of them are pretty (like datahen.com), some of them are more ascetic (like web-scraper.com), but all of them allow you to send your requirements to developers.

Scrapinghub.com has a quite long form, but most of the fields are optional and all the questions are quite natural. If you really know what you need, then it won’t be hard to answer all of them; moreover they rather help you to describe your need in detail.

Note, that in the context of the project I didn’t make a request for a scraper itself. I asked to receive data on a weekly basis only.

Getting responses

Since I sent my request on Sunday it would have been ok not to receive responses the same day, but I got the first response in 3 hrs! It was from web-scraper.com and stated that this project will cost me $250 monthly. Simple and clear. Thank you, Thang!

Right after that, I received the second response. This time it was Keval from webdata-scraping.com. He had some questions regarding the project. Then after two days he wrote me that it would be hard to scrape some of my data with the software he uses, and that he will try to use a custom scraper. After that he disappeared… ((

Then on Monday I received Cost & ETAT details from datahen.com. It looked quite professional and contained not only price, but also time estimation. They were ready to create such a scraper in 3-4 days for $249 and then maintain it for just $65/month.

On the same day I received a quote from iwebscraping.com. It was $60 per week. Everything is fine, but I’d like to mention that it wasn’t the last letter from them. After I replied to them (right after receiving the quote), I received a reminder letter from them every other day for about a week. So be ready for aggressive marketing if you ask them for a quote )).

Finally in two days after requesting a quote I got a response from scrapinghub.com. Paul Tremberth wrote me that they were ready to build a scraper for $1200 and then maintain it for $300/month.

It is interesting that I have never received an answer from grepsr.com! Two years ago it was the first web scraping service we faced on the web, but now they simply ignored my request! Or perhaps they didn’t receive it somehow? Anyway I had no time for investigation.

So what?

Let us put everything together. Out of six web scraping  services I received four quotes with the following prices:

Service     Setup fee     Monthly fee

web-scraper.com     -     $250
datahen.com     $249     $65
iwebscraping.com     -     $240
scrapinghub.com     $1200     $300

From this table you can see that  scrapinghub.com appears to be the most expensive service among those compared.

EDIT: These $300/month gives you as much support and development needed to fix a 5M multi-site web crawler, for example. If you need a cheaper solution you can use their Autoscraping tool, which is free, and would have costed around $2/month to crawl at my requested rates.

The average cost of monthly scraping is about $250, but from a long term perspective datahen.com may save you money due to their low monthly fee.

That’s it! If I had enough money available it would be interesting to compare all these services in operation and provide you a more complete report, but this is all I have for now.

If you have anything to share about your experience in using similar services, please contribute to this post by commenting on it below. Cheers!

Source: http://scraping.pro/choosing-web-scraping-service/

Why People Hesitate To Try Data Mining

What is hindering a number of people from venturing into the promising world of data mining? Despite so much encouragement, promotions, testimonials, and evidences of the benefits of online data collection, still only a handful take the challenge and really gain the pay offs it has to offer.

It may sound unthinkable that such an opportunity for success has been neglected by many. It may also sound absurd why many well-meaning individuals are hindered from enjoying the benefits of the blessings of the 21st century.

The Causes

After considerable observation and analysis of the human psyche, one can understand the underlying reasons behind the hesitance to try the profitable data mining service. The most common reasons why people are afraid to try new technology or why they remain passive and uninvolved are: fear; lack of knowledge; and pride.

Fear. The most paralyzing of human emotions is fear. It can, to some extent, cause a person to be insane, unprofitable, sick, and lost. Although fear is a normal reaction to certain stimuli and a natural feeling experienced by humans, it must always be monitored and controlled.  Usually, people share common fears, such as: fear of change; fear of anything new; and fear of the unknown.

Source:http://www.loginworks.com/blogs/web-scraping-blogs/people-hesitate-try-data-mining/

Why Web Scraping is Indispensable

The 21st century has opened the gates to hidden treasures and unlimited access to information globally without the constraints of time and space, through Internet technology. Along with this development comes the necessity for each business or company to get as much information as possible in order in order to thrive in the ever increasing demand for new innovations, comparisons, and trends.

Web scraping has consequently become an indispensable option to achieve all the needed data as quickly and efficiently as possible. In this view, data mining then appears to be the best and the only way to answer the present demand for updates, data, coping, foreknowledge, analysis, and evaluation. Indeed, information has inevitably become a valuable commodity and the most sought after product among online and offline entrepreneurs.

Need for Data

The increasing need for new data makes it possible for the experts to become increasingly creative in accessing information worldwide. The more knowledge one has, the better are his or her chances of growing and surviving. There seems to be no other time in the human existence where data has become so much a major source of revenue as the contemporary times.

Source:http://www.loginworks.com/blogs/web-scraping-blogs/web-scraping-indispensable/

Scraping webdata from a website that loads data in a streaming fashion

I'm trying to scrape some data off of the FEC.gov website using python for a project of mine. Normally I use python

mechanize and beautifulsoup to do the scraping.

I've been able to figure out most of the issues but can't seem to get around a problem. It seems like the data is

streamed into the table and mechanize.Browser() just stops listening.

So here's the issue: If you visit http://query.nictusa.com/cgi-bin/can_ind/2011_P80003338/1/A ... you get the first 500

contributors whose last name starts with A and have given money to candidate P80003338 ... however, if you use

browser.open() at that url all you get is the first ~5 rows.

I'm guessing its because mechanize isn't letting the page fully load before the .read() is executed. I tried putting a

time.sleep(10) between the .open() and .read() but that didn't make much difference.

And I checked, there's no javascript or AJAX in the website (or at least none are visible when you use the 'view-

source'). SO I don't think its a javascript issue.

Any thoughts or suggestions? I could use selenium or something similar but that's something that I'm trying to avoid.

-Will

2 Answers

Why not use an html parser like lxml with xpath expressions.

I tried

>>> import lxml.html as lh
>>> data = lh.parse('http://query.nictusa.com/cgi-bin/can_ind/2011_P80003338/1/A')
>>> name = data.xpath('/html/body/table[2]/tr[5]/td[1]/a/text()')
>>> name
[' AABY, TRYGVE']
>>> name = data.xpath('//table[2]/*/td[1]/a/text()')
>>> len(name)
500
>>> name[499]
' AHMED, ASHFAQ'
>>>



Similarly, you can create xpath expression of your choice to work with.


Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9435512/scraping-webdata-from-a-website-that-loads-data-in-a-streaming-

fashion

Web data scraping (online news comments) with Scrapy (Python)

Since you seem like the try-first ask-question later type (that's a very good thing), I won't give you an answer, but a (very detailed) guide on how to find the answer.

The thing is, unless you are a yahoo developer, you probably don't have access to the source code you're trying to scrape. That is to say, you don't know exactly how the site is built and how your requests to it as a user are being processed on the server-side. You can, however, investigate the client-side and try to emulate it. I like using Chrome Developer Tools for this, but you can use others such as FF firebug.

So first off we need to figure out what's going on. So the way it works, is you click on the 'show comments' it loads the first ten, then you need to keep clicking for the next ten comments each time. Notice, however, that all this clicking isn't taking you to a different link, but lively fetches the comments, which is a very neat UI but for our case requires a bit more work. I can tell two things right away:

    They're using javascript to load the comments (because I'm staying on the same page).
    They load them dynamically with AJAX calls each time you click (meaning instead of loading the comments with the page and just showing them to you, with each click it does another request to the database).

Now let's right-click and inspect element on that button. It's actually just a simple span with text:

<span>View Comments (2077)</span>

By looking at that we still don't know how that's generated or what it does when clicked. Fine. Now, keeping the devtools window open, let's click on it. This opened up the first ten. But in fact, a request was being made for us to fetch them. A request that chrome devtools recorded. We look in the network tab of the devtools and see a lot of confusing data. Wait, here's one that makes sense:

http://news.yahoo.com/_xhr/contentcomments/get_comments/?content_id=42f7f6e0-7bae-33d3-aa1d-3dfc7fb5cdfc&_device=full&count=10&sortBy=highestRated&isNext=true&offset=20&pageNumber=2&_media.modules.content_comments.switches._enable_view_others=1&_media.modules.content_comments.switches._enable_mutecommenter=1&enable_collapsed_comment=1

See? _xhr and then get_comments. That makes a lot of sense. Going to that link in the browser gave me a JSON object (looks like a python dictionary) containing all the ten comments which that request fetched. Now that's the request you need to emulate, because that's the one that gives you what you want. First let's translate this to some normal reqest that a human can read:

go to this url: http://news.yahoo.com/_xhr/contentcomments/get_comments/
include these parameters: {'_device': 'full',
          '_media.modules.content_comments.switches._enable_mutecommenter': '1',
          '_media.modules.content_comments.switches._enable_view_others': '1',
          'content_id': '42f7f6e0-7bae-33d3-aa1d-3dfc7fb5cdfc',
          'count': '10',
          'enable_collapsed_comment': '1',
          'isNext': 'true',
          'offset': '20',
          'pageNumber': '2',
          'sortBy': 'highestRated'}

Now it's just a matter of trial-and-error. However, a few things to note here:

    Obviously the count is what decides how many comments you're getting. I tried changing it to 100 to see what happens and got a bad request. And it was nice enough to tell me why - "Offset should be multiple of total rows". So now we understand how to use offset

    The content_id is probably something that identifies the article you are reading. Meaning you need to fetch that from the original page somehow. Try digging around a little, you'll find it.

    Also, you obviously don't want to fetch 10 comments at a time, so it's probably a good idea to find a way to fetch the number of total comments somehow (either find out how the page gets it, or just fetch it from within the article itself)

    Using the devtools you have access to all client-side scripts. So by digging you can find that that link to /get_comments/ is kept within a javascript object named YUI. You can then try to understand how it is making the request, and try to emulate that (though you can probably figure it out yourself)

    You might need to overcome some security measures. For example, you might need a session-key from the original article before you can access the comments. This is used to prevent direct access to some parts of the sites. I won't trouble you with the details, because it doesn't seem like a problem in this case, but you do need to be aware of it in case it shows up.

    Finally, you'll have to parse the JSON object (python has excellent built-in tools for that) and then parse the html comments you are getting (for which you might want to check out BeautifulSoup).

As you can see, this will require some work, but despite all I've written, it's not an extremely complicated task either.

So don't panic.

It's just a matter of digging and digging until you find gold (also, having some basic WEB knowledge doesn't hurt). Then, if you face a roadblock and really can't go any further, come back here to SO, and ask again. Someone will help you.


Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20218855/web-data-scraping-online-news-comments-with-scrapy-python

A good web data extraction/screen scraper program?

I need to capture product data from a site on a regular basis and wondered if any one knows of a good software program?

I've trialed Mozenda but its a monthly subscription and pricey in the long term. Obviously something thats free would

be best but I don't mind paying either. Just need a decent program thats reliable and doesn't require much programming

knowledge.

You can try ScraperWiki.com if you know python.

I've experimented with Screen-Scraper and found it easy to use. The application comes in multiple versions: basic

(which is free), professional, and enterprise. Also, multiple platforms are supported.

Hire a programmer to do it so that there is only a one off cost. I often see similar projects on freelancing websites

like Elance and oDesk.

I really like iMacros. You can give it a test drive to see if it meets your needs with the totally free Firefox

extension (there's also IE versions), but there are also more full featured application and "server" versions that have

more features and ability to do thing in an unattended manner.

Here are some other alternatives to consider:

    License the data from the provider. Call em up and ask 'em.

    Use Amazon Mechanical Turk to get humans to copy and paste and format it for ya. They are cheap.

    For automation, it depends on how complicated the HTML is and how often it changes. You could use Excel's Web Data

Import if it's really simple.


You can use irobot from IRobotSoft, which is totally free, and provides more functionalityies than other paid software.

Watch demos here http://irobotsoft.com/help/ for how simple it is.

Questions on their forum were answered very quickly.


Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2334164/a-good-web-data-extraction-screen-scraper-program

How to login to website and extract data using PHP [closed]

I have installed the tiny tiny rss on to my computer (Windows) and also have Xampp installed (localhost).

I want to be able to use PHP to extract data from the Tiny tiny RSS webpage.

I have tried this it which just opens the front page:

<?php
$homepage = file_get_contents('my install tiny tiny rss url');
echo $homepage;
?>

But how do I login and extract the data.

You can use cURL to send post data and headers. To login you need to replicate the exact data exchange between the client and the server.


SOurce: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20611918/how-to-login-to-website-and-extract-data-using-php