Have You Ever Heard To Web Scraping Expert Use Business Information?

Have you ever heard of "data scraping?" Scaling of the use of information and data scraping technology made his fortune many a successful trader is not new technology. Sometimes website owners automated harvesting of your data can not be happy with sitting

Fortunately there is a modern solution to this problem. Proxy data scraping technology solves the problem by using proxy IP addresses. Scraping data each time you run the program, organized the evacuation of a website, the website thinks that it comes from a different IP address. For website owners, worldwide only a short period of increased traffic from the proxy data scraping sounds.

Now you might be asking yourself: "Can the technology proxy data scraping project?" Certainly better than the choice is dangerous and unreliable (but) free public proxy servers.

There are literally thousands of the world that is quite easy to free proxy servers are all on. But the trick is finding them. Many sites list hundreds of servers, but open to find, and the protocol perseverance, trial and error, works for one of the first lessons you something about server to server, or do not know what activities are going for. A public proxy requests or sensitive data transmitted through a bad idea.

A less risky scenario for proxy data for scraping a rotating proxy connection goes through many private IP addresses to hire.

Scrape data from the software-only website is the proven process of extracting data from the Web. Offer the best of the web software to extract data. We have the expertise and knowledge in web data extraction, image, display, email extract, eliminate services, data mining and web intervene to eliminate.

For example, many companies based on their own needs, in particular, helped to find the data.

Data collection

Generally, data, information, automated computer programs for processing by the appropriate structures transmission. Such formats and protocols are usually strictly structured, well-documented, easily decompose, and confusion to a minimum. Very often, these transmissions are not human readable.

Tractor unit that automatically Extractor is an email from a reliable source that the e-mail ID helps to remove. This is fundamentally different than web pages, HTML files, text files or other format, business services contacts duplicate email addresses without.

A web spider is a computer program that a methodical, automated or surf the World Wide Web in a systematic way. Especially the many sites in the search engines, up-to-date information, as a means to quickly use.

Proxy data scraping technology solves the problem by using proxy IP addresses. Every time your data scraping program is a production of a website, the website that comes from a different IP address. The owner of this website, proxy data from around the world in an increase in traffic looks exactly like scraping the short term.

Now you might be asking yourself, "my project where I can get the data scraping proxy technology?" "Do it yourself" solution, but unfortunately, there is no need to call. Consider hosting the proxy server you choose to rent, but this option is quite pricey, but definitely better than the alternative is incredibly dangerous (but) free public proxy server.

Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/outsourcing-articles/have-you-ever-heard-to-web-scraping-expert-use-business-information-6250856.html

Why Hand-Scraped Flooring?

So many types of flooring possibilities exist on the market, so why hand-scraped hardwood and why now? Trends for hardwoods come and go. In recent years, the demand for exotic species has grown, and even more closer to the present, requests for hand-scraped flooring are also increasing. As a result, nearly all species are available hand-scraped, but walnut, hickory, cherry, and oak are the most popular.

In the past, parquet was a popular style of flooring, and while seldom seen in the present, parquet was characterized by an angular style and contrasting woods. Not relying on color, hand-scraped flooring instead goes for texture. The wood is typically scraped by hand, creating a rustic and unique look for every plank. But rather than be exclusively rough, some hand-scraped products have a smoother sculpted look, such as hand-sculpted hardwood, and this flooring is often considered "classic."

Texture, as well, makes the flooring have additional visual and tactile dimensions. Those walking on the floor may just want to run their hands over the surface to feel the knots, scraping, and sculpted portions. However, tastes for hand-scraped flooring vary by region. According to top hardwood manufacturer Armstrong, the sculpted look is more requested in California, while a rustic appearance of knots, mineral streaks, and graining is more common in the Southwest. The Northeast, on the other hand, is just catching onto this trend.

There's no one look for hand-scraped flooring. Rather, hardwood is altered through scraping or brushing, finishing, or aging; a combination of such techniques may also be used.

Scraped or brushed hardwoods are sold under names "wire brushed," which has accented grain and no sapwood; "hand-sculpted," which indicates a smoother distressed appearance; and "hand hewn and rough sawn," which describes the roughest product available.

Aged hand-scraped products go by "time worn aged" or "antique." For both of these, the wood is aged, and then the appearance is accented through dark-colored staining, highlighting the grain, or contouring. A lower grade of hardwood is used for antique.

A darker stain tends to bring out the look of hand-scraped flooring. For woods that have specifically been stained, "French bleed" is the most common. Such a product has deeper beveled edges, and joints are emphasized with a darker color stain.

No matter the look for hand-scraped flooring, the hardwood is altered by hand, generally by a trained craftsman, such as an Amish woodworker. As a result, every plank looks unique. However, "hand-scraped" and "distressed" are often used interchangeably, but not all "distressed" products are altered by hand. Instead, the hardwood is distressed by machine, which presses a pattern into the surface of the wood.

Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/home-improvement-articles/why-hand-scraped-flooring-5488704.html

Scraping Fantasy Football Projections from the Web

In this post, I show how to download fantasy football projections from the web using R.  In prior posts, I showed how to scrape projections from ESPN, CBS, NFL.com, and FantasyPros.  In this post, I compile the R scripts for scraping projections from these sites, in addition to the following sites: Accuscore, Fantasy Football Nerd, FantasySharks, FFtoday, Footballguys, FOX Sports, WalterFootball, and Yahoo.

Why Scrape Projections?

Scraping projections from multiple sources on the web allows us to automate importing the projections with a simple script.  Automation makes importing more efficient so we don’t have to manually download the projections whenever they’re updated.  Once we import all of the projections, there’s a lot we can do with them, like:

•    Determine who has the most accurate projections
•    Calculate projections for your league
•    Calculate players’ risk levels
•    Calculate players’ value over replacement
•    Identify sleepers
•    Calculate the highest value you should bid on a player in an auction draft
•    Draft the best starting lineup
•    Win your auction draft
•    Win your snake draft

The R Scripts

To scrape the projections from the websites, I use the readHTMLTable function from the XML package in R.  Here’s an example of how to scrape projections from FantasyPros:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8    

#Load libraries

library("XML")

#Download fantasy football projections from FantasyPros.com

qb_fp <- readHTMLTable("http://www.fantasypros.com/nfl/projections/qb.php", stringsAsFactors = FALSE)$data

rb_fp <- readHTMLTable("http://www.fantasypros.com/nfl/projections/rb.php", stringsAsFactors = FALSE)$data

wr_fp <- readHTMLTable("http://www.fantasypros.com/nfl/projections/wr.php", stringsAsFactors = FALSE)$data

te_fp <- readHTMLTable("http://www.fantasypros.com/nfl/projections/te.php", stringsAsFactors = FALSE)$data

view raw FantasyPros projections hosted with ❤ by GitHub

The R Scripts for scraping the different sources are located below:

1.    Accuscore
2.    CBS - Jamey Eisenberg
3.    CBS – Dave Richard
4.    CBS – Average
5.    ESPN
6.    Fantasy Football Nerd
7.    FantasyPros
8.    FantasySharks
9.    FFtoday
10.    Footballguys – David Dodds
11.    Footballguys – Bob Henry
12.    Footballguys – Maurile Tremblay
13.    Footballguys – Jason Wood
14.    FOX Sports
15.    NFL.com
16.    WalterFootball
17.    Yahoo

Density Plot

Below is a density plot of the projections from the different sources:Calculate projections

Conclusion

Scraping projections from the web is fast, easy, and automated with R.  Once you’ve downloaded the projections, there’s so much you can do with the data to help you win your league!  Let me know in the comments if there are other sources you want included (please provide a link).

Source:http://fantasyfootballanalytics.net/2014/06/scraping-fantasy-football-projections.html

Extractions and Skin Care

As an esthetician or skin care professional, you may have heard some controversy over the matter of performing extractions during a routine facial service. What may seem like a relatively simple procedure can actually raise great controversy in the world of esthetics. Some estheticians regard extractions as a matter of providing a complete service while others see this as inflicting trauma to the skin. Learning more about both sides of the issue can help you as a professional in making an informed decision and explaining the issue to your clients.

What is an extraction?

As a basic review, an extraction is removing impurity (plug of dead skin or oil) from a pore or pimple. It is the removal of both blackheads and whiteheads from the skin. Extractions occur after the skin has been thoroughly cleansed, exfoliated and sometimes steamed to soften the area prior to extraction.

Why Do It?

Extractions are considered a "must" by many estheticians when performing a routine facial because they want to leave their clients skin looking and feeling it's best. When done correctly, a simple extraction should be quick and relatively painless. As a trained esthetician it is important to know if your client has sensitive skin which would make them more prone to the damage that can be caused by extractions.

Why Not?

Extractions should only be performed by a trained esthetician and should not be done in excess. Extractions can cause broken capillaries or sin irritations that can lead to more (not less) breakouts. Extractions can also cause discomfort for your client when done incorrectly so you should seek their permission before performing any type of extraction during their facial. Remember your client has the right to know any product or procedure being performed on their skin and make an informed choice.

Who Decides?

As an esthetician it may be entirely up to you or it may be a procedure within your salon to do or not do extractions. It is important to check the guidelines of your employer and know their policies before performing any procedure. Remember to explain extractions and their benefits and possible complications to your client. Trust is an important part of any relationship and your client needs to know you are being open and honest with them. The last thing you want as a professional is a reputation for inflicting unnecessary and unwanted procedures or damage to your client's skin.

Bellanina Institute's owner and director, Nina Howard, is a multi-talented, forward-thinking entrepreneur who has built the Bellanina brand form the ground up to a successful million-dollar spa, spa training business, and skin care product line. Nina is a Licensed Esthetician with Para-Medical studies, Massage Therapist, Polarity Therapist, Skin Care Educator, Artist, and Professional Interior Designer.

Source:http://ezinearticles.com/?Extractions-and-Skin-Care&id=5271715

Benefits of Predictive Analytics and Data Mining Services

Predictive Analytics is the process of dealing with variety of data and apply various mathematical formulas to discover the best decision for a given situation. Predictive analytics gives your company a competitive edge and can be used to improve ROI substantially. It is the decision science that removes guesswork out of the decision-making process and applies proven scientific guidelines to find right solution in the shortest time possible.

Predictive analytics can be helpful in answering questions like:

•    Who are most likely to respond to your offer?
•    Who are most likely to ignore?
•    Who are most likely to discontinue your service?
•    How much a consumer will spend on your product?
•    Which transaction is a fraud?
•    Which insurance claim is a fraudulent?
•    What resource should I dedicate at a given time?

Benefits of Data mining include:

•    Better understanding of customer behavior propels better decision
•    Profitable customers can be spotted fast and served accordingly
•    Generate more business by reaching hidden markets
•    Target your Marketing message more effectively
•    Helps in minimizing risk and improves ROI.
•    Improve profitability by detecting abnormal patterns in sales, claims, transactions etc
•    Improved customer service and confidence
•    Significant reduction in Direct Marketing expenses

Basic steps of Predictive Analytics are as follows:

•    Spot the business problem or goal
•    Explore various data sources such as transaction history, user demography, catalog details, etc)
•    Extract different data patterns from the above data
•    Build a sample model based on data & problem
•    Classify data, find valuable factors, generate new variables
•    Construct a Predictive model using sample
•    Validate and Deploy this Model

Standard techniques used for it are:

•    Decision Tree
•    Multi-purpose Scaling
•    Linear Regressions
•    Logistic Regressions
•    Factor Analytics
•    Genetic Algorithms
•    Cluster Analytics
•    Product Association

Should you have any queries regarding Data Mining or Predictive Analytics applications, please feel free to contact us. We would be pleased to answer each of your queries in detail.

Source:http://ezinearticles.com/?Benefits-of-Predictive-Analytics-and-Data-Mining-Services&id=4766989

Do blog scraping sites violate the blog owner's copyright?

I noticed that my blog has been posted on one of these website scraping sites. This is the kind of site that has no original content, but just repeats or scrapes content others have written and does it to get some small amount of ad income from ads on the scraping site. In essence the scraping site is taking advantage of the content of the originating site in order to make a few dollars from people who go to the site looking for something else. Some of these websites prey on misspelling. If you accidentally misspell the name of an original site, you just may end up with one of these patently commercial scraping sites.

Google defines scraping as follows:

•    Sites that copy and republish content from other sites without adding any original content or value
•    Sites that copy content from other sites, modify it slightly (for example, by substituting synonyms or using automated techniques), and republish it
•    Sites that reproduce content feeds from other sites without providing some type of unique organization or benefit to the user

My question, as set out in the title to this post, is whether or not scraping is a violation of copyright. It turns out that the answer is likely very complicated.  You have to look at the definition of a scraping site very carefully. Let me give you some hypotheticals to show what I mean.

Let's suppose that I write a blog and put a link in my blog post to your blog. Does that link violate your copyright? I can't imagine that anyone would think that there was problem with linking to another website on the Web. In this case, there is no content from the originating site, just a link.

But let's carry the hypothetical a little further. What if I put a link to your site and quote some of your content? Does this violate copyright law? If you are acquainted with any of the terminology of copyright law; think fair use. The issue here is whether or not the "quoted" material is a substantial reproduction of the entire original content? I would have the opinion that duplicating an entire blog post either with or without attribution would be a violation of the originator's copyright.

So is the scraping website protected by the "fair use" doctrine? Does the fact that the motivation for listing the original websites is to make money have anything to do with how you would decide if there was or was not a violation of the originator's copyright? By the way, the copyright does not make a distinction between a commercial and non-commercial use of the original constituting or not constituting a violation of copyright. The fact that the reproducing (scraping) party does not make money from the reproduction is not a factor in the issue of violation, although it may ultimately be an issue as to the amount of damages assessed.

Does the fact that the actions of the scraper annoy me, make any difference? I would answer, not in the least. Whether or not you are annoyed by the violation of the copyright makes no difference as to whether or not there is a violation. Likewise, you have no independent claims for your wounded feelings because of the copied content. Copyright is a statutory action (i.e. based on statutory law) and unless the cause of action is recognized by the law, there is no cause of action. Now, in an outrageous case, you may have  some kind of tort (personal injury) claim, but that is way outside of my hypothetical situation.

So what is the answer? Does scraping violate the originator's copyright? If only a small portion of the blog is copied (scraped) then I would have to have the opinion that it is not. Essentially, no matter what the motivation of the scrapper, there is not enough content copied to violate the fair use doctrine. Now, that is my opinion. Your's might differ. That is what makes lawsuits.

Do I think there are other reasons why scraping websites are objectionable? Certainly, but those reasons have nothing to do with copyright and they are probably the subject of another different blog post. So, if you are reading this from scraping website, bear in mind that there may be a serious problem with that type of website.

Source:http://genealogysstar.blogspot.in/2013/05/do-blog-scraping-sites-violate-blog.html

Local ScraperWiki Library

It quite annoyed me that you can only use the scraperwiki library on a ScraperWiki instance; most of it could work fine elsewhere. So I’ve pulled it out (well, for Python at least) so you can use it offline.

How to use
pip install scraperwiki_local
A dump truck dumping its payload

You can then import scraperwiki in scripts run on your local computer. The scraperwiki.sqlite component is powered by DumpTruck, which you can optionally install independently of scraperwiki_local.

pip install dumptruck
Differences

DumpTruck works a bit differently from (and better than) the hosted ScraperWiki library, but the change shouldn’t break much existing code. To give you an idea of the ways they differ, here are two examples:

Complex cell values
What happens if you do this?
import scraperwiki
shopping_list = ['carrots', 'orange juice', 'chainsaw']
scraperwiki.sqlite.save([], {'shopping_list': shopping_list})
On a ScraperWiki server, shopping_list is converted to its unicode representation, which looks like this:
[u'carrots', u'orange juice', u'chainsaw']
In the local version, it is encoded to JSON, so it looks like this:
["carrots","orange juice","chainsaw"]


And if it can’t be encoded to JSON, you get an error. And when you retrieve it, it comes back as a list rather than as a string.

Case-insensitive column names
SQL is less sensitive to case than Python. The following code works fine in both versions of the library.

In [1]: shopping_list = ['carrots', 'orange juice', 'chainsaw']
In [2]: scraperwiki.sqlite.save([], {'shopping_list': shopping_list})
In [3]: scraperwiki.sqlite.save([], {'sHOpPiNg_liST': shopping_list})
In [4]: scraperwiki.sqlite.select('* from swdata')

Out[4]: [{u'shopping_list': [u'carrots', u'orange juice', u'chainsaw']}, {u'shopping_list': [u'carrots', u'orange juice', u'chainsaw']}]

Note that the key in the returned data is ‘shopping_list’ and not ‘sHOpPiNg_liST’; the database uses the first one that was sent. Now let’s retrieve the individual cell values.

In [5]: data = scraperwiki.sqlite.select('* from swdata')
In [6]: print([row['shopping_list'] for row in data])
Out[6]: [[u'carrots', u'orange juice', u'chainsaw'], [u'carrots', u'orange juice', u'chainsaw']]

The code above works in both versions of the library, but the code below only works in the local version; it raises a KeyError on the hosted version.

In [7]: print(data[0]['Shopping_List'])
Out[7]: [u'carrots', u'orange juice', u'chainsaw']

Here’s why. In the hosted version, scraperwiki.sqlite.select returns a list of ordinary dictionaries. In the local version, scraperwiki.sqlite.select returns a list of special dictionaries that have case-insensitive keys.

Develop locally

Here’s a start at developing ScraperWiki scripts locally, with whatever coding environment you are used to. For a lot of things, the local library will do the same thing as the hosted. For another lot of things, there will be differences and the differences won’t matter.

If you want to develop locally (just Python for now), you can use the local library and then move your script to a ScraperWiki script when you’ve finished developing it (perhaps using Thom Neale’s ScraperWiki scraper). Or you could just run it somewhere else, like your own computer or web server. Enjoy!

Source:https://blog.scraperwiki.com/2012/06/local-scraperwiki-library/

A quick guide on web scraping: Why and how

Web scraping, which is the collection and cleaning of online data, is the first step in any
data-driven project. Here’s a short video that explains what scraping is, and how to create
automated scraping jobs using a digital tool.

This is a 15-minute video created by an instructor at Ohio State University. In the first six
minutes, the instructor talks about why we need web scraping; he then shows how to use a
scraping tool, OutWit Hub, to collect data scattered in a large database.

FYI: read reviews by Reporters’ Lab of OutWit Hub and other web scraping tools.

Source: http://www.mulinblog.com/quick-guide-web-scraping/

Scraping and Analyzing Angel List Syndicates: Kimono Labs + Silk

Because we use Silk to tell stories and visualize data, we are always looking for interesting ways to pull data into a Silk. Right now that means getting data into the CSV format. Fortunately, a wave of new and powerful visual webscraping tools and services have emerged. These make it very simple for anyone (no technical skills required) to scrape data from a website and export that data into a CSV which we can quickly upload into a Silk.

Cool New Scraping Tools

One of the tools we love in this new space is Kimono Labs. Backed by Y Combinator, Kimono combines a visual scraping editor with the ability to do very granular code-inspector level editing to scraping paths. Saved scrapes can be turned into APIs and exported as JSON. Kimono also lets you save time-series versioning of scrapes.

Data from angel-list-syndicates.silk.co
Like many startups, we watch the goings on at AngelList very closely. Syndicates are of particular interest. Basically, these are DIY venture capital pools that allow a qualified investor to serve as a syndicate leader and aggregate small investments from other qualified investors who are members of AngelList. The idea of the syndicates is to democratize the VC process and make it easier and less risky for individuals to participate.

We used Kimono to scrape information on the Top 25 Syndicates ranked by dollars backing each round. Kimono makes it very easy to visually designate which parts of a page to scrape and how many rows there are on a page. (Here you can see me highlighting the minimum dollar investment). We downloaded the information as a CSV and did a quick scrub to get it ready for upload to Silk. The process took no more than 15 minutes.

We could tell by eyeballing the numbers beforehand that a serious Power Law was in effect. And the actual data analysis on Silk bore this out. We chose to use a pie chart to show distribution. Three syndicates control nearly two-thirds of all the committed capital by Angel.co members in the syndicate program. One of the top three - Tim Ferriss - has no background as a venture capitalist or building technology companies but is rapidly becoming a force in startup investing. The person with the largest committed syndicate pool, Gil Penachina, is someone who is a quiet mover and shaker in Silicon Valley but he clearly packs a huge punch.

The largest syndicate in terms of likely commitments of deals per year is Foundry Group Angels, a group led by Brad Feld (@bfeld). While they put in less per deal, they are planning to back over 50 deals per year - a huge number. Trailing far behind those three was media impresario and Launch conference mogul Jason Calacanis, who is one of the most visible people in the startup space.

Source: http://blog.silk.co/post/83501793279/scraping-and-analyzing-angel-list-syndicates

What you have to know before requesting web scraping services?

Before you request web scraping services you have to know what are your needs (what data you need, structure of it and where you can find this data).

Step 1: Define what data you need?
Data needs depending on purpose, if you want to find new customers you probably need contact data from players in your industry. Also if you want to study your competitors you need to define who are they. Only after that you can select data sources (websites feeds or other electronic sources) for this extraction.

In many cases for discovering and defining data sources are used search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and others.

Step 2: Structure of data

Data structure it’s directly linked to usage purpose. In many cases data structure it’s a table where a row represents an entity and a cell of this row represents a property of this entity. In other cases Data structure is a a chart or another graphic representation builder with data extracted from a web source.

Step 3: Number of data extraction

In many cases is needed one time data extraction. In other cases when you need a regular report, are needed periodically extractions.

If you have defined all of above points you are ready to request a quote and an amount estimation from this contact form.

Source: http://thewebminer.com/blog/2013/08/

Scraping XML Tables with R

A couple of my good friends also recently started a sports analytics blog. We’ve decided to collaborate on a couple of studies revolving around NBA data found at www.basketball-reference.com. This will be the first part of that project!

Data scientists need data. The internet has lots of data. How can I get that data into R? Scrape it!

People have been scraping websites for as long as there have been websites. It’s gotten pretty easy using R/Python/whatever other tool you want to use. This post shows how to use R to scrape the demographic information for all NBA and ABA players listed at www.basketball-reference.com.

Here’s the code:

###### Settings

library(XML)

 ###### URLs

url<-paste0("http://www.basketball-reference.com/players/",letters,"/")

len<-length(url)

 ###### Reading data

tbl<-readHTMLTable(url[1])[[1]]

 for (i in 2:len)

    {tbl<-rbind(tbl,readHTMLTable(url[i])[[1]])}

 ###### Formatting data

colnames(tbl)<-c("Name","StartYear","EndYear","Position","Height","Weight","BirthDate","College")

tbl$BirthDate<-as.Date(tbl$BirthDate[1],format="%B %d, %Y")

Created by Pretty R at inside-R.org

And here’s the result:Result

Source: http://www.r-bloggers.com/scraping-xml-tables-with-r/

Data Mining KNN Classifier

Q1   

Suppose a data analyst working for an insurance company was asked to build a predictive model for predicting weather a customer will buy a mobile home insurance policy. S/he tried kNN classifier with different number of neighbours (k=1,2,3,4,5). S/he got the following F-scores measured on the training data: (1.0; 0.92; 0.90; 0.85; 0.82). Based on that the analyst decided to deploy kNN with k=1. Was it a good choice? How would you select an optimal number of neighbours in this case?

1 Answer

It is not a good idea to select a parameter of a prediction algorithm using the whole training set as the result will be biased towards this particular training set and has no information about generalization performance (i.e. performance towards unseen cases). You should apply a cross-validation technique e.g. 10-fold cross-validation to select the best K (i.e. K with largest F-value) within a range. This involves splitting your training data in 10 equal parts retain 9 parts for training and 1 for validation. Iterate such that each part has been left out for validation. If you take enough folds this will allow you as well to obtain statistics of the F-value and then you can test whether these values for different K values are statistically significant.

See e.g. also: http://pic.dhe.ibm.com/infocenter/spssstat/v20r0m0/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.ibm.spss.statistics.help%2Falg_knn_training_crossvalidation.htm

The subtlety here however is that there is likely a dependency between the number of data points for prediction and the K-value. So If you apply cross-validation you use 9/10 of the training set for training...Not sure whether any research has been performed on this and how to correct for that in the final training set. Anyway most software packages just use the abovementioned techniques e.g. see SPSS in the link. A solution is to use leave-one-out cross-validation (each data samples is left out once for testing) in that case you have N-1 training samples(the original training set has N).

Source:http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21121509/data-mining-knn-classifier?rq=1

Using Kimono Labs to Scrape the Web for Free

Historically, I have written and presented about big data—using data to create insights, and how to automate your data ingestion process by connecting to APIs and leveraging advanced database technologies.

Recently I spoke at SMX West about leveraging the rich data in webmaster tools. After the panel, I was approached by the in-house SEO of a small company, who asked me how he could extract and leverage all the rich data out there without having a development team or large budget. I pointed him to the CSV exports and some of the more hidden tools to extract Google data, such as the GA Query Builder and the YouTube Analytics Query Builder.

However, what do you do if there is no API? What do you do if you want to look at unstructured data, or use a data source that does not provide an export?

For today's analytics pros, the world of scraping—or content extraction (sounds less black hat)—has evolved a lot, and there are lots of great technologies and tools out there to help solve those problems. To do so, many companies have emerged that specialize in programmatic content extraction such as Mozenda, ScraperWiki, ImprtIO, and Outwit, but for today's example I will use Kimono Labs. Kimono is simple and easy to use and offers very competitive pricing (including a very functional free version). I should also note that I have no connection to Kimono; it's simply the tool I used for this example.

Before we get into the actual "scraping" I want to briefly discuss how these tools work.

The purpose of a tool like Kimono is to take unstructured data (not organized or exportable) and convert it into a structured format. The prime example of this is any ranking tool. A ranking tool reads Google's results page, extracts the information and, based on certain rules, it creates a visual view of the data which is your ranking report.

Kimono Labs allows you to extract this data either on demand or as a scheduled job. Once you've extracted the data, it then allows you to either download it via a file or extract it via their own API. This is where Kimono really shines—it basically allows you to take any website or data source and turn it into an API or automated export.

For today's exercise I would like to create two scrapers.

A. A ranking tool that will take Google's results and store them in a data set, just like any other ranking tool. (Disclaimer: this is meant only as an example, as scraping Google's results is against Google's Terms of Service).

B. A ranking tool for Slideshare. We will simulate a Slideshare search and then extract all the results including some additional metrics. Once we have collected this data, we will look at the types of insights you are able to generate.

1. Sign up

Signup is simple; just go to http://www.kimonolabs.com/signup and complete the form. You will then be brought to a welcome page where you will be asked to drag their bookmarklet into your bookmarks bar.

The Kimonify Bookmarklet is the trigger that will start the application.

2. Building a ranking tool

Simply navigate your browser to Google and perform a search; in this example I am going to use the term "scraping." Once the results pages are displayed, press the kimonify button (in some cases you might need to search again). Once you complete your search you should see a screen like the one below:

It is basically the default results page, but on the top you should see the Kimono Tool Bar. Let's have a close look at that:

The bar is broken down into a few actions:

    URL – Is the current URL you are analyzing.

    ITEM NAME – Once you define an item to collect, you should name it.

    ITEM COUNT – This will show you the number of results in your current collection.

    NEW ITEM – Once you have completed the first item, you can click this to start to collect the next set.

    PAGINATION – You use this mode to define the pagination link.

    UNDO – I hope I don't have to explain this ;)

    EXTRACTOR VIEW – The mode you see in the screenshot above.

    MODEL VIEW – Shows you the data model (the items and the type).

    DATA VIEW – Shows you the actual data the current page would collect.

    DONE – Saves your newly created API.

After you press the bookmarklet you need to start tagging the individual elements you want to extract. You can do this simply by clicking on the desired elements on the page (if you hover over it, it changes color for collectable elements).

Kimono will then try to identify similar elements on the page; it will highlight some suggested ones and you can confirm a suggestion via the little checkmark:

A great way to make sure you have the correct elements is by looking at the count. For example, we know that Google shows 10 results per page, therefore we want to see "10" in the item count box, which indicates that we have 10 similar items marked. Now go ahead and name your new item group. Each collection of elements should have a unique name. In this page, it would be "Title".

Now it's time to confirm the data; just click on the little Data icon to see a preview of the actual data this page would collect. In the data view you can switch between different formats (JSON, CSV and RSS). If everything went well, it should look like this:

As you can see, it not only extracted the visual title but also the underlying link. Good job!

To collect some more info, click on the Extractor icon again and pick out the next element.

Now click on the Plus icon and then on the description of the first listing. Since the first listing contains site links, it is not clear to Kimono what the structure is, so we need to help it along and click on the next description as well.

As soon as you do this, Kimono will identify some other descriptions; however, our count only shows 8 instead of the 10 items that are actually on that page. As we scroll down, we see some entries with author markup; Kimono is not sure if they are part of the set, so click the little checkbox to confirm. Your count should jump to 10.

Now that you identified all 10 objects, go ahead and name that group; the process is the same as in the Title example. In order to make our Tool better than others, I would like to add one more set— the author info.

Once again, click the Plus icon to start a new collection and scroll down to click on the author name. Because this is totally unstructured, Google will make a few recommendations; in this case, we are working on the exclusion process, so press the X for everything that's not an author name. Since the word "by" is included, highlight only the name and not "by" to exclude that (keep in mind you can always undo if things get odd).

Once you've highlighted both names, results should look like the one below, with the count in the circle being 2 representing the two authors listed on this page.

Out of interest I did the same for the number of people in their Google+ circles. Once you have done that, click on the Model View button, and you should see all the fields. If you click on the Data View you should see the data set with the authors and circles.

As a final step, let's go back to the Extractor view and define the pagination; just click the Pagination button (it looks like a book) and select the next link. Once you have done that, click Done.

You will be presented with a screen similar to this one:

Here you simply name your API, define how often you want this data to be extracted and how many pages you want to crawl. All of these settings can be changed manually; I would leave it with On demand and 10 pages max to not overuse your credits.

Once you've saved your API, there are a ton of options (too many to review here). Kimono has a great learning section you can check out any time.

To collect the listings requires a quick setup. Click on the pagination tab, turn it on and set your schedule to On demand to pull data when you ask it to. Your screen should look like this:

Now press Crawl and Kimono will start collecting your data. If you see any issues, you can always click on Edit API and go back to the extraction screen.

Once the crawl is completed, go to the Test Endpoint tab to view or download your data (I prefer CSV because you can easily open it in Excel, CSV, Spotfire, etc.) A possible next step here would be doing this for multiple keywords and then analyzing the impact of, say, G+ Authority on rankings. Again, many of you might say that a ranking tool can already do this, and that's true, but I wanted to cover the basics before we dive into the next one.

3. Extracting SlideShare data

With Slideshare's recent growth in popularity it has become a document sharing tool of choice for many marketers. But what's really on Slideshare, who are the influencers, what makes it tick? We can utilize a custom scraper to extract that kind data from Slideshare.

To get started, point your browser to Slideshare and pick a keyword to search for.

For our example I want to look at presentations that talk about PPC in English, sorted by popularity, so the URL would be:

http://www.slideshare.net/search/slideshow?ft=presentations&lang=en&page=1&q=ppc&qf=qf1&sort=views&ud=any

Once you are on that page, pick the Kimonify button as you did earlier and tag the elements. In this case I will tag:

    Title
    Description
    Category
    Author
    Likes
    Slides

Once you have tagged those, go ahead and add the pagination as described above.

That will make a nice rich dataset which should look like this:

Hit Done and you're finished. In order to quickly highlight the benefits of this rich data, I am going to load the data into Spotfire to get some interesting statics (I hope).

4. Insights

Rather than do a step-by-step walktrough of how to build dashboards, which you can find here, I just want to show you some insights you can glean from this data:

    Most Popular Authors by Category. This shows you the top contributors and the categories they are in for PPC (squares sized by Likes)

    Correlations. Is there a correlation between the numbers of slides vs. the number of likes? Why not find out?
    Category with the most PPC content. Discover where your content works best (most likes).

5. Output

One of the great things about Kimono we have not really covered is that it actually converts websites into APIs. That means you build them once, and each time you need the data you can call it up. As an example, if I call up the Slideshare API again tomorrow, the data will be different. So you basically appified Slisdeshare. The interesting part here is the flexibility that Kimono offers. If you go to the How to Use slide, you will see the way Kimono treats the Source URL In this case it looks like this:

The way you can pull data from Kimono aside from the export is their own API; in this case you call the default URL,

http://www.kimonolabs.com/api/YOURPAIID?apikey=YO...

You would get the default data from the original URL; however, as illustrated in the table above, you can dynamically adjust elements of the source URL.

For example, if you append "&q=SEO"

(http://www.kimonolabs.com/api/YOURPAIID?apikey=YOURAPIKEY&q=SEO)

you would get the top slides for SEO instead of PPC. You can change any of the URL options easily.

I know this was a lot of information, but believe me when I tell you, we just scratched the surface. Tools like Kimono offer a variety of advanced functions that really open up the possibilities. Once you start to realize the potential, you will come up with some amazing, innovative ideas. I would love to see some of them here shared in the comments. So get out there and start scraping … and please feel free to tweet at me or reply below with any questions or comments!

Source: http://moz.com/blog/web-scraping-with-kimono-labs

Web Scraping for SEO with these Open-Source Scrapers

When conducting Search Engine Optimization (SEO), we’re required to scrape websites for data, our campaigns, and reports for our clients. At the lowest level we utilize scraping to keep track of rankings on search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo, even keep a track of links on websites to know when it’s completed its lifespan. Then we’ve used them to help us aggregate data from APIs, RSS feeds, and websites to conduct some of our data mining to find patterns to help us become more competitive. 

So scraping is a function majority of companies (SEOmoz, Raventools, and Google) have to do to either save money, protect intellectual property, track trends, etc… Businesses can find infinite uses with scraping tools, it just depends if you’re an printed circuit board manufacturer looking for ideas on your e-mail marketing campaign or a Orange County based business trying to keep an eye out on the competition. which is why we’ve created a comprehensive list of open source scrapers out there to help all the businesses out there. Just keep in mind we haven’t used all of them!

Words of caution, web scrapers require knowledge specific to the language such as PHP & cURL. Take into considerations issues like cookie management, fault tolerance, organizing the data properly, not crashing the website being scraped, and making sure the website doesn’t prohibit scraping.

If you’re ready, here’s the list…

Erlang

    eBot

Java

    Heritrix
    Nutch
    Piggy Bank
    WebSPHINX
    WebHarvest

PHP

    PHPCrawl
    Snoopy
    SpiderMonkey

Python

    BeautifulSoap
    HarvestMan
    Scrape.py
    Scrapemark
    Scrapy **
    Mechanize

Ruby

    Anemone
    scRUBYt

We’ll come back and update this list as we encounter more! If you would like to submit a solution we missed, feel free. Also we’re looking for guides related to each of these, so if you know of any or would be interested in guesting blogging about one, let us know!

Source:http://www.annexcore.com/blog/web-scraping-for-seo-with-these-open-source-scrapers/

How to scrape data without coding? A step by step tutorial on import.io

Import.io (pronounced import-eye-oh) lets you scrape data from any website into a searchable database. It is perfect for gathering, aggregating and analysing data from websites without the need for coding skills. As Sally Hadadi, from Import.io, told Journalism.co.uk: the idea is to “democratise” data. “We want journalists to get the best information possible to encourage and enhance unique, powerful pieces of work and generally make their research much easier.” Different uses for journalists, supplemented by case studies, can be found here.

A beginner’s guide

After downloading and opening import.io browser, copy the URL of the page you want to scrape into the import.io browser. I decided to scrape the search results website of orphanages in London:

001 Orphanages in London

After opening the website, press the tiny pink button in top right corner of the browser and follow up with “Let’s get cracking!” in the bottom right menu which has just appeared.

Then, choose the type of scraping you want to perform. In my case, it’s a Crawler (we’ll be getting data from multiple similar pages on the same site):

crawler

And confirm the URL of the website you want to scrape by clicking “I’m there”.

As advised, choose “Detect optimal settings” and confirm the following:

data

In the menu “Rows per page” select the format in which data appears on the website, whether it is “single” or “multiple”. I’m opting for the multiple as my URL is a listing of multiple search results:multiple

Now, the time has come to “train your rows” i.e. mark which part of the website you are interested in scraping. Hover over an entire “entry” or “paragraph”:hover over entry

…and he entry will be highlighted in pink or blue. Press “Train rows”.

train rows

Repeat the operation with the next entry/paragraph so that the scraper gets the hang of the pattern of your selections. Two examples should suffice. Scroll down to the bottom of your website to make sure that all entries until the last one are selected (=highlighted in pink or blue alternately).

If it is, press “I’ve got all 50 rows” (the number depends on how many rows you have selected).

Now it’s time to focus on particular chunks of data you would like to extract. My entries consist of a name of the orphanage, address, phone number and a short description so I will extract all those to separate columns. Let’s start by adding a column “name”:

add column

Next, highlight the name of the first orphanage in the list and press “Train”.

highlighttrain

Your table should automatically fill in with names of all orphanages in the list:table name

If it didn’t, try tweaking your selection a bit. Then add another column “address” and extract the address of the orphanage by highlighting the two lines of addresses and “training” the rows.

Repeat the operation for a “phone number” and “description”. Your table should end up looking like this:table final

*Before passing on to the next column it is worth to check that all the rows have filled up. If not, highlighting and training of the individual elements might be necessary.

Once you’ve grabbed all that you need, click “I’ve got what I need”. The menu will now ask you if you want to scrape more pages. In this case, the search yielded two pages of search results so I will add another page. In order to this this, go back to your website in you regular browser, choose page 2 (or any next one) of your search results and copy the URL. Paste it into the import.io browser and confirm by clicking “I’m there”:

i'm there

The scraper should automatically fill in your table for page 2. Click “I’ve got all 45 rows” and “I’ve got what I needed”.

You need to add at least 5 pages, which is a bit frustrating with a smaller data set like this one. The way around it is to add page 2 a couple of times and delete the unnecessary rows in the final table.

Once the cheating is done, click “I’m done training!” and “Upload to import.io”.

upload

Give the name to your Crawler, e.g. “Orphanages in London” and wait for import.io to upload your data. Then, run crawler:run crawler

Make sure that the page depth is 10 and that click “Go”. If you’re scraping a huge dataset with several pages of search results, you can copy your URLs to Excel, highlight them and drag down with a black cross (bottom right of the cell) to obtain a comprehensive list. Paste it into the “Where to start?” window and press “Go”.go

crawlingAfter the crawling is complete, you can download you data in EXCEL, HTML, JSON or CSV.dataset

As a result, we obtain a data set which can be easily turned into a map of orphanages in London, e.g. using Google Fusion Tables.

Source:http://www.interhacktives.com/2014/03/06/scrape-data-without-coding-step-step-tutorial-import-io/

Is Web Scraping Legal?

Web scraping might be one of the best ways to aggregate content from across the internet, but it comes with a caveat: It’s also one of the hardest tools to parse from a legal standpoint.

For the uninitiated, web scraping is a process whereby an automated piece of software extracts data from a website by “scraping” through the site’s many pages. While search engines like Google and Bing do a similar task when they index web pages, scraping engines take the process a step further and convert the information into a format which can be easily transferred over to a database or spreadsheet.

It’s also important to note that a web scraper is not the same as an API. While a company might provide an API to allow other systems to interact with its data, the quality and quantity of data available through APIs is typically lower than what is made available through web scraping. In addition, web scrapers provide more up-to-date information than APIs and are much easier to customize from a structural standpoint.

The applications of this “scraped” information are widespread. A journalist like Nate Silver might use scrapers to monitor baseball statistics and create numerical evidence for a new sports story he’s working on. Similarly, an eCommerce business might bulk scrape product titles, prices, and SKUs from other sites in order to further analyze them.

Legality of Web ScrapingWhile web scraping is an undoubtedly powerful tool, it’s still undergoing growing pains when it comes to legal matters. Because the scraping process appropriates pre-existing content from across the web, there are all kinds of ethical and legal quandaries that confront businesses who hope to do leverage scrapers for their own processes.

In this “wild west” environment, where the legal implications of web scraping are in a constant state of flux, it helps to get a foothold on where the legal needle currently falls. The following timeline outlines some of the biggest cases involving web scrapers in the United States, and allows us to achieve a greater understanding on the precedents that surround the court rulings.

Terms of Use Tug-of-War—2000-2009

For years after they first came into use, web scrapers went largely unchallenged from a legal standpoint. In 2000, however, the use of scrapers came under heavy and consistent fire when eBay fired the first shot against an auction data aggregator called Bidder’s Edge. In this very early case, eBay argued that Bidder’s Edge was using scrapers in a way that violated Trespass to Chattels doctrine. While the lawsuit was settled out of court, the judge upheld eBay’s original injunction, stating that heavy bot traffic could very well disrupt eBay’s service.

Then in 2003’s Intel Corp. v. Hamidi, the California Supreme court overturned the basis of eBay v. Bidder’s Edge, ruling that Trespass to Chattels could not extend to the context of computers if no actual damage to personal property occurred.

So in terms of legal action against web scraping, Tresspass to Chattels no longer applied, and things were back to square one. This began a period in which the courts consistently rejected Terms of Service as a valid means of prohibiting scrapers, including cases like Perfect 10 v. Google, and Cvent v. Eventbrite.

The Takeaway: The earliest cases against scrapers hinged on Trespass to Chattels law, and were successful. However, that doctrine is no longer a valid approach.

Facebook Web Scraping2009—Facebook Steps In

In 2009, Facebook turned the tides of the web scraping war when Power.com, a site which aggregated multiple social networks into one centralized site, included Facebook in their service. Because Power.com was scraping Facebook’s content instead of adhering to their established standards, Facebook sued Power on grounds of copyright infringement.

In denying Power.com’s motion to dismiss the case, the Judge ruled that scraping can constitute copying, however momentary that copying may be. And because Facebook’s Terms of Service don’t allow for scraping, that act of copying constituted an infringement on Facebook’s copyright. With this decision, the waters regarding the legality of web scrapers began to shift in favor of the content creators.

The Takeaway: Even if a web scraper ignores infringing content on its way to freely-usable content, it might qualify as copyright infringement by virtue of having technically “copied” the infringing content first.

2011-2014— U.S. v Auernheimer

In 2010, hacker Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer found a security flaw in AT&T’s website, which would display the email addresses of users who visited the site via their iPads. By exploiting the flaw using some simple scripts and a scraper, Auernheimer was able to gather thousands of emails from the AT&T site.

Although these email addresses were publicly available, Auernheimer’s exploit led to his 2012 conviction, where he was charged with identity fraud and conspiracy to access a computer without authorization.

Data ScrapingEarlier this year, the court vacated Auernheimer’s conviction, ruling that the trial’s New Jersey venue was improper. But even though the case turned out to be mostly inconclusive, the court noted the fact that there was no evidence to show that “any password gate or code-based barrier was breached.” This seems to leave room for the web scraping of publicly-available personal information, although it’s still very much open to interpretation and not set in stone.

The Takeaway: Using a web scraper to aggregate sensitive personal information can lead to a conviction, even if that information was technically available to the public. While there is hope in the court’s observation that no passwords or barriers were broken to retrieve this information, the waters here are still very volatile.

2013—Associated Press vs. Meltwater

Meltwater is a software company whose “Global Media Monitoring” product uses scrapers to aggregate news stories for paying clients. The Associated Press took issue with Meltwater’s scraping of their original stories, some of which had been copyrighted. In 2012, AP filed suit against Meltwater for copy infringement and hot news misappropriation.

While it’s already been established that facts cannot be copyrighted, the court decided that the AP’s copyrighted articles—and more specifically, the way in which the facts within those articles were arranged—were not fair game for copying. On top of this, Meltwater’s use of the articles failed to meet the established fair use standards, and could not be defended on that front either.

The Takeaway: Fair use is limited when it comes to web scrapers, and copyrighted content is not always open to be scraped.

~~

By closely observing the outcomes of previous rulings, you’ll find that there are a few guidelines that a scraper should attempt to adhere to:

    Content being scraped is not copyright protected
    The act of scraping does not burden the services of the site being scraped
    The scraper does not violate the Terms of Use of the site being scraped
    The scraper does not gather sensitive user information
    The scraped content adheres to fair use standards

While all of these guidelines are important to understand before using scrapers, there are other ways to acclimate to the legal nuances. In many cases, you’ll find that a simple conversation with a business software developer or consultant will lead to some satisfying conclusions: Odds are, they’ve used scrapers in the past and can shed light on any snags they’ve hit in the process. And of course, talking with a lawyer is always an ideal course of action when treading into questionable legal territory.

Source:http://blog.icreon.us/2014/09/12/web-scraping-and-you-a-legal-primer-for-one-of-its-most-useful-tools/

Scraping Data: Site-specific Extractors vs. Generic Extractors

Scraping is becoming a rather mundane job with every other organization getting its feet wet with it for their own data gathering needs. There have been enough number of crawlers built – some open-sourced and others internal to organizations for in-house utilities. Although crawling might seem like a simple technique at the onset, doing this at a large-scale is the real deal. You need to have a distributed stack set up to take care of handling huge volumes of data, to provide data in a low-latency model and also to deal with fail-overs. This still is achievable after crossing the initial tech barrier and via continuous optimizations. (P.S. Not under-estimating this part because it still needs a team of Engineers monitoring the stats and scratching their heads at times).

Social Media Scraping

Focused crawls on a predefined list of sites

However, you bump into a completely new land if your goal is to generate clean and usable data sets from these crawls i.e. “extract” data in a format that your DB can process and aid in generating insights. There are 2 ways of tackling this:

a. site-specific extractors which give desired results

b. generic extractors that result in few surprises

Assuming you still do focused crawls on a predefined list of sites, let’s go over specific scenarios when you have to pick between the two-

1. Mass-scale crawls; high-level meta data - Use generic extractors when you have a large-scale crawling requirement on a continuous basis. Large-scale would mean having to crawl sites in the range of hundreds of thousands. Since the web is a jungle and no two sites share the same template, it would be impossible to write an extractor for each. However, you have to settle in with just the document-level information from such crawls like the URL, meta keywords, blog or news titles, author, date and article content which is still enough information to be happy with if your requirement is analyzing sentiment of the data.

cb1c0_one-size

A generic extractor case

Generic extractors don’t yield accurate results and often mess up the datasets deeming it unusable. Reason being

programatically distinguishing relevant data from irrelevant datasets is a challenge. For example, how would the extractor know to skip pages that have a list of blogs and only extract the ones with the complete article. Or delineating article content from the title on a blog page is not easy either.

To summarize, below is what to expect of a generic extractor.

Pros-

minimal manual intervention

low on effort and time

can work on any scale

Cons-

Data quality compromised

inaccurate and incomplete datasets

lesser details suited only for high-level analyses

Suited for gathering- blogs, forums, news

Uses- Sentiment Analysis, Brand Monitoring, Competitor Analysis, Social Media Monitoring.

2. Low/Mid scale crawls; detailed datasets - If precise extraction is the mandate, there’s no going away from site-specific extractors. But realistically this is do-able only if your scope of work is limited i.e. few hundred sites or less. Using site-specific extractors, you could extract as many number of fields from any nook or corner of the web pages. Most of the times, most pages on a website share similar templates. If not, they can still be accommodated for using site-specific extractors.

cutlery

Designing extractor for each website

Pros-

High data quality

Better data coverage on the site

Cons-

High on effort and time

Site structures keep changing from time to time and maintaining these requires a lot of monitoring and manual intervention

Only for limited scale

Suited for gathering - any data from any domain on any site be it product specifications and price details, reviews, blogs, forums, directories, ticket inventories, etc.

Uses- Data Analytics for E-commerce, Business Intelligence, Market Research, Sentiment Analysis

Conclusion

Quite obviously you need both such extractors handy to take care of various use cases. The only way generic extractors can work for detailed datasets is if everyone employs standard data formats on the web (Read our post on standard data formats here). However, given the internet penetration to the masses and the variety of things folks like to do on the web, this is being overly futuristic.

So while site-specific extractors are going to be around for quite some time, the challenge now is to tweak the generic ones to work better. At PromptCloud, we have added ML components to make them smarter and they have been working well for us so far.

What have your challenges been? Do drop in your comments.

Source: https://www.promptcloud.com/blog/scraping-data-site-specific-extractors-vs-generic-extractors/

How to scrape Amazon with WebDriver in Java

Here is a real-world example of using Selenium WebDriver for scraping.
This short program is written in Java and scrapes book title and author from the Amazon webstore.
This code scrapes only one page, but you can easily make it scraping all the pages by adding a couple of lines.

You can download the souce here.

import java.io.*;
import java.util.*;
import java.util.regex.*;

import org.openqa.selenium.*;
import org.openqa.selenium.firefox.FirefoxDriver;

public class FetchAllBooks {

    public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {

        WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver();
      

driver.navigate().to("http://www.amazon.com/tag/center%20right?ref_=tag_dpp_cust_itdp_s_t&sto

re=1");

        List<WebElement> allAuthors =  driver.findElements(By.className("tgProductAuthor"));
        List<WebElement> allTitles =  driver.findElements(By.className("tgProductTitleText"));
        int i=0;
        String fileText = "";

        for (WebElement author : allAuthors){
            String authorName = author.getText();
            String Url = (String)((JavascriptExecutor)driver).executeScript("return

arguments[0].innerHTML;", allTitles.get(i++));
            final Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("title=(.+?)>");
            final Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(Url);
            matcher.find();
            String title = matcher.group(1);
            fileText = fileText+authorName+","+title+"\n";
        }

        Writer writer = new BufferedWriter(new OutputStreamWriter(new

FileOutputStream("books.csv"), "utf-8"));
        writer.write(fileText);
        writer.close();

        driver.close();
    }
}

Source: http://scraping.pro/scraping-amazon-webdriver-java/

Web Scraping: Business Intelligence

Web scraping is simply getting of information that is both hidden and unhidden from the internet. Web scraping is one of the latest technologies used in harvesting data from WebPages. It has been used to extract useful information for practical and beneficial applications and its interpretation has been tested in decision making. Web scraping is a new term that overshadows the traditional data harvesting technique that was used before. It has been regarded as knowledge discovery in databases for research and even marketing monitoring.

This article explores the various business intelligence ways in which web scraping can be used to be of importance.

Web scraping services has been used by many companies that have a strong customer focus. These companies range from sectors like retail, financial services, and marketing and communication organizations. It quite important to realize that web scraping has great signifies and impact in the varied commercial applications for the better understanding and prediction of the critical data. The data may range from stocks to consumer behaviors. The consumer behaviors are better shown in trends like customer profiles, purchasing and industry analysis among others.

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

Web Scraping: The Invaluable Decision Making Tool

Business decisions are mandatory in any company. They reflect and directly influence about the future of the company. It is important to realize that decisions must be made in any business situation. The generation of new ideas calls for new actions. This in turn calls for decisions. Decisions can only be made when there is adequate information or data regarding the problem and the cause of action to be taken. Web scraping offers the best opportunity in getting the required information that will enable the management make a wise and sound decision.

Therefore web scraping is an important part in generation of the practical interpretations for the business decision making process. Since businesses take many courses of actions the following areas call for adequate web scraping in order to make outstanding decisions.

1. Suppliers. Whether you are running an offline business there is need to get information regarding your suppliers. In this case there are two situations. The first situation is about your current suppliers and the second situation is about the possibility of acquiring new suppliers. By web scraping you has the opportunity to gather about your suppliers. You need to know other business they are supplying to and the kind of discounts and prices they offer to them. Another important aspect about consumers is to determine the periods when they have surplus and therefore be able to determine the purchasing prices.

Web scraping can provide new information concerning new suppliers. This will make a cutting edge in the purchasing sector. You can get new suppliers that have reasonable prices. This will go a long way in ensuring a profitable business. Therefore web scraping is an integral process that should be taken first before making a vital decision concerning suppliers.

Source:http://www.loginworks.com/blogs/web-scraping-blogs/web-scraping-invaluable-decision-making-tool/

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

How can I circumvent page view limits when scraping web data using Python?

I am using Python to scrape US postal code population data from http:/www.city-data.com, through this directory: http://www.city-data.com/zipDir.html. The specific pages I am trying to scrape are individual postal code pages with URLs like this: http://www.city-data.com/zips/01001.html. All of the individual zip code pages I need to access have this same URL Format, so my script simply does the following for postal_code in range:

    Creates URL given postal code
    Tries to get response from URL
    If (2), Check the HTTP of that URL
    If HTTP is 200, retrieves the HTML and scrapes the data into a list
    If HTTP is not 200, pass and count error (not a valid postal code/URL)
    If no response from URL because of error, pass that postal code and count error
    At end of script, print counter variables and timestamp

The problem is that I run the script and it works fine for ~500 postal codes, then suddenly stops working and returns repeated timeout errors. My suspicion is that the site's server is limiting the page views coming from my IP address, preventing me from completing the amount of scraping that I need to do (all 100,000 potential postal codes).

My question is as follows: Is there a way to confuse the site's server, for example using a proxy of some kind, so that it will not limit my page views and I can scrape all of the data I need?

Thanks for the help! Here is the code:

##POSTAL CODE POPULATION SCRAPER##

import requests

import re

import datetime

def zip_population_scrape():

    """
    This script will scrape population data for postal codes in range
    from city-data.com.
    """
    postal_code_data = [['zip','population']] #list for storing scraped data

    #Counters for keeping track:
    total_scraped = 0
    total_invalid = 0
    errors = 0


    for postal_code in range(1001,5000):

        #This if statement is necessary because the postal code can't start
        #with 0 in order for the for statement to interate successfully
        if postal_code <10000:
            postal_code_string = str(0)+str(postal_code)
        else:
            postal_code_string = str(postal_code)

        #all postal code URLs have the same format on this site
        url = 'http://www.city-data.com/zips/' + postal_code_string + '.html'

        #try to get current URL
        try:
            response = requests.get(url, timeout = 5)
            http = response.status_code

            #print current for logging purposes
            print url +" - HTTP:  " + str(http)

            #if valid webpage:
            if http == 200:

                #save html as text
                html = response.text

                #extra print statement for status updates
                print "HTML ready"

                #try to find two substrings in HTML text
                #add the substring in between them to list w/ postal code
                try:           

                    found = re.search('population in 2011:</b> (.*)<br>', html).group(1)

                    #add to # scraped counter
                    total_scraped +=1

                    postal_code_data.append([postal_code_string,found])

                    #print statement for logging
                    print postal_code_string + ": " + str(found) + ". Data scrape successful. " + str(total_scraped) + " total zips scraped."
                #if substrings not found, try searching for others
                #and doing the same as above   
                except AttributeError:
                    found = re.search('population in 2010:</b> (.*)<br>', html).group(1)

                    total_scraped +=1

                    postal_code_data.append([postal_code_string,found])
                    print postal_code_string + ": " + str(found) + ". Data scrape successful. " + str(total_scraped) + " total zips scraped."

            #if http =404, zip is not valid. Add to counter and print log        
            elif http == 404:
                total_invalid +=1

                print postal_code_string + ": Not a valid zip code. " + str(total_invalid) + " total invalid zips."

            #other http codes: add to error counter and print log
            else:
                errors +=1

                print postal_code_string + ": HTTP Code Error. " + str(errors) + " total errors."

        #if get url fails by connnection error, add to error count & pass
        except requests.exceptions.ConnectionError:
            errors +=1
            print postal_code_string + ": Connection Error. " + str(errors) + " total errors."
            pass

        #if get url fails by timeout error, add to error count & pass
        except requests.exceptions.Timeout:
            errors +=1
            print postal_code_string + ": Timeout Error. " + str(errors) + " total errors."
            pass


    #print final log/counter data, along with timestamp finished
    now= datetime.datetime.now()
    print now.strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M")
    print str(total_scraped) + " total zips scraped."
    print str(total_invalid) + " total unavailable zips."
    print str(errors) + " total errors."



Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/25452798/how-can-i-circumvent-page-view-limits-when-scraping-web-data-using-python

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_commen

ts.switches._enable_view_others=1&_media.modules.content_comments.switches._enable_mutecommenter=1&enable_collapsed_com

ment=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

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

Is it ok to scrape data from Google results?

I'd like to fetch results from Google using curl to detect potential duplicate content. Is there a high risk of being banned by Google?

Google will eventually block your IP when you exceed a certain amount of requests.



Google disallows automated access in their TOS, so if you accept their terms you would break them.

That said, I know of no lawsuit from Google against a scraper. Even Microsoft scraped Google, they powered their search engine Bing with it. They got caught in 2011 red handed :)

There are two options to scrape Google results:

1) Use their API

    You can issue around 40 requests per hour You are limited to what they give you, it's not really useful if you want to track ranking positions or what a real user would see. That's something you are not allowed to gather.

    If you want a higher amount of API requests you need to pay.
    60 requests per hour cost 2000 USD per year, more queries require a custom deal.

2) Scrape the normal result pages

    Here comes the tricky part. It is possible to scrape the normal result pages. Google does not allow it.
    If you scrape at a rate higher than 15 keyword requests per hour you risk detection, higher than 20/h will get you blocked from my experience.
    By using multiple IPs you can up the rate, so with 100 IP addresses you can scrape up to 2000 requests per hour. (50k a day)
    There is an open source search engine scraper written in PHP at http://scraping.compunect.com It allows to reliable scrape Google, parses the results properly and manages IP addresses, delays, etc. So if you can use PHP it's a nice kickstart, otherwise the code will still be useful to learn how it is done.


Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22657548/is-it-ok-to-scrape-data-from-google-results

Data Scraping from PDF and Excel

I am doing a little data scraping, There are 3 types of file from which i am scraping data.

1- HTML
2- PDF
3- Excel(xls)

For HTML i am comfortable, i am using HTML Agility for that.

For PDF and excel i need suggestions from anyone.



Concerning Excel. If you are in a MS environment you can either do Office Automation or use OLEDB. In a Java environment look at Apache POI.

EDIT: Concerning PDF in Java try Apache PDFBox . Can also work in .NET using IKVM

I can recommend Cogniview's PDF2XL, a reasonably inexpensive commercial product, to extract data from tables in PDF files into Excel. We have used it with great success.

HTML Agility is a library. Its good to use. But then, why do you need separate tools for different data extraction purposes? Use Automation Anywhere to extract data from any source. As far as I know, it would work for all the three sources you have specified. Google it.

Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3147803/data-scraping-from-pdf-and-excel

Excel VBA Data Mining Real-Time Data from a Web Page that Refreshes Data

I want to capture real-time data that updates into a table on a webpage; I prefer capturing it into excel using VBA, but I will write it in .NET C# or VB if I that is easier.

the data updates about 1 or 2 seconds, and I want to just grab the latest data quotes and log it into my spreadsheet; the table names are the same, only the data refreshes, and it does so automatically on the web page.

I've done a lot of Excel VBA and I know how to download a URL to a file--this is NOT what I want; I want to gain access to my webpage that is active and grab the data updates after I've logged into my site and selected a webpage that I like.

Is there a simple way to access this data on the webpage from Excel or .Net? Because it refreshes no more than once every 1 or 2 seconds, it is easy to just keep checking it for updates, and I can compare the latest data to see if it actually refreshed.


In Excel 2003, use Data/Import External Data/New Web Query
Browse to your page and select the table you want to import.
After that you can either do a manual Refresh, or use a timer procedure to do something like:

Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9855794/excel-vba-data-mining-real-time-data-from-a-web-page-that-refreshes-data

Need to pull data from a website…web query? macro?

I have a list of every DOT # (Dept. of Trans.) in the country. I want to find out insurance effective date for each one of these companies. If you go to http://li-public.fmcsa.dot.gov --> "continue" --> then from the dropdown select "carrier search" and hit "go" it'll take you to a search form (that is the only way to get to this screen).

From there, you can input a DOT # X (use 61222 as an example) and it'll bring you to another screen. Click "view report in HTML" and then down on the bottom you'll see "Active/Pending Insurance". I want to pull the "effective date" from that page and stick it in the spreadsheet next to the DOT # X that I already know.

Of the thousands of DOT #'s in my list, not all will have filings on this website, if that makes a difference.

Can this be done with a Macro or Excel Web Query? I know I probably sound like a total novice, but I'd appreciate any help I could get.

Can you do it? Frankly even if you could you'd lock up the spreadsheet while it's doing that processing. And in the end, how would you handle an error half-way through?

I'd not do this in a client-facing application. This sounds more like something to do in server-side app that can do the processing and gather the information in a more controlled environment. Then you Excel spreadsheet could query that app and get the information in one fell swoop. Error handling is much simpler and you don't end up sitting there staring at Excel why it works its way through thousands of web sites. It was not built to do that elegantly.

What do you write the web service I'm describing in? Well it depends on your preference. Me, I'd write it in Ruby on Rails since it can easily handle the scraping aspect of the task and can report the data out easily as well. But it really falls back to whatever you're most comfortable coding in.


Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15286429/need-to-pull-data-from-a-website-web-query-macro

How to extract data from web 2.0 graphs using a scraper

I have recently come across a web page containing a graph object that displays the (x, y) values on the object as the

mouse is rolled across it. Is there any way to automate the extraction of this data?

How is the graph data loaded? If embedded in the page source then you can extract it with xpath or regex. Else use

Firebug to see how it is loaded.



You will need a solution that works inside the web browser, so the AJAX/Javascript is properly rendered.

I have used iMacros with good success for web scraping in the past. There are free/open-source and "PRO" paid editions

(comparison table here).

Another option is always to custom code something with the Microsoft webbrowser control.


Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3980774/how-to-extract-data-from-web-2-0-graphs-using-a-scraper