There are many services and tools that we have at our disposal when it comes to taking advantage of the online platforms and devices that we use. When browsing the Internet, it is often necessary to obtain certain data and information. We can make use of what is known as web Scraping . In this article we will explain what it consists of and we will also give some options for it.
What is web Scraping
With web Scraping, or also known as web scraping , we refer to the method through which we can extract information from websites. For this, software is used that can even simulate the normal navigation of a user, but automating the process.
We can relate web Scraping to the indexing of a website in search engines. Now, in this case it is more focused on transforming unstructured data on the web (for example HTML format) into structured data that can be stored and analyzed in a database or spreadsheet.
For the subject of web positioning, this technique has been widely used in recent years. It also serves to compare prices in online stores, data monitoring, etc. Many users rely on this feature to create quality content.
In short, we can say that web Scraping consists of extracting information from a web page. Something that we can do at the user level, manually, but that we can also use computer programs for it.
Scraping web programs to extract information
We are going to see some free programs that we can use to collect information from a web page.
Parsehub
One of the tools that we have at our disposal is that of Parsehub . It is a desktop application that allows you to connect to any website from which we want to extract data. It has a neat interface and is also easy to use. We can export the data in different formats such as JSON, CSV or Excel .
The first thing we have to do to start using Parsehub is to download it from its website. We will see that it is available for Windows, Linux and macOS. Once we have it downloaded, the next step will be to install it. Once we execute it, it will ask us to create an account.
When we open it, a window like the one we see in the image above will appear. Later we will have to create a new project and write the address from which we are interested in extracting data to get it started.
Scrapers
Another option we have to collect information from a website is Scrapers . In this case, it is a web tool , also free, that will allow you to carry out this action in a simple and intuitive way. The extracted data can be exported in JSON, HTML and CSV.
When we enter your website we will see that it is necessary to register to use the service. From there we will have to create a new Scraper, put the necessary data and give it to start. It will start collecting information from that site.
Scrapingdog
A similar alternative to the previous one is Scrapingdog . We can test your free trial version. We will have to register, one more time. For a basic use this free version will be enough. It also has a paid one to access through a proxy and be able to extract data from more complex sites.
As in the previous cases we will have to put the URL that interests us and begin to extract information from that site.
Dexi.io
Dexi has a simple interface that allows us to extract data in real time from any web page using its built-in machine learning technology. It allows to extract both texts and images. It is based on a cloud solution and allows the export of extracted data to platforms such as Google Sheets, Amazon S3 and other similar ones.
Beyond extracting data, with Dexi we can also monitor in real time. It has tools to keep us updated on all the changes that may occur in a specific site. A way to have a greater knowledge also about the competition, in case of having a page to sell products online, for example. It has a free option for basic use, but it also has other paid options.
In short, these are some options we have to perform web Scraping. We have seen some simple programs that can be useful for those who need to extract information from websites.