10 Best Web Scraping APIs for Data.. Top 10 Best Web Scraping APIs & Alternatives (2021)

10 Best Web Scraping APIs for Data.. Top 10 Best Web Scraping APIs & Alternatives (2021)

A web scrapping API is software that allows users and developers to scrape information from websites without getting being detected. The APIs implement Captcha avoidance and IP rotation strategies to execute the users' search requests.

What is the best Web Scraping API?

After reviewing all the Web Scraping APIs, we found these 10 APIs to be the very best and worth mentioning:

• ScrapingBee API
• Scrapper’s Proxy API
• ScrapingAnt API
• ScrapingMonkey API
• AI Web Scraper API
• Site Scraper API
• ScrapeGoat API
• Scrappet API
• Scraper – Crawler – Extract API
• Scraper Box API

Web Scraping

ScrapingBee	Best for Rotating proxies	Connect to API
Scrapper’s Proxy	Best for Proxies for faster speeds and higher success rates	Connect to API
ScrapingAnt	Best for Customizing browser settings	Connect to API
ScrapingMonkey	Connect to API
AI Web Scraper	Best for Intelligent web page extraction using AI algorithms	Connect to API
Site Scraper	Best for Fetching site titles	Connect to API
ScrapeGoat	Best for Web page screenshots and SPA applications pre-rendering	Connect to API
Scrappet	Best for Web page data extraction using URLs	Connect to API
Scraper – Crawler – Extract	Best for Associated website links and browsing URLs	Connect to API
Scraper Box	Best for Data extraction without blockades	Connect to API

Our Top Picks for Best Web Scraping APIs

1. ScrapingBee

ScrapingBee fetches URLs for specific websites from which data is to be scrapped.

This API allows the users to have seamless data extraction as it eliminates any challenges that may arise during the process. It helps in resolving CAPTCHA, supports deployment of headless Chrome browser and custom cookies.

The API also supports JavaScript rendering allowing the users to scrape data with Vue.js, AngularJS and React. This feature helps the users to execute JavaScript snippets using custom wait. Once the requests are received and processed, the API returns the data in HTML supported formats. Among the key benefits of this API is that it supports rotating proxies allowing the users to surpass the website rate limits. The result of the rotating proxies is a large proxy pool and Geotargeting.

The users can benefit from the documentation provided to understand the workings of the API quickly.

How much does Web Scraping cost. Features and benefits of Web Scraping

Web scraping is fast
While you can manually perform typical web scraping tasks, an automated web scraper performs them quicker and more efficiently. Parsing an entire website can take just minutes with a web scraper. It would take several hours for a human to perform the same task.

Web scraping is cost-effective
Web scrapers perform a complicated but repetitive task efficiently. Instead of employing a team of researchers to manually pore over websites and perform analyses, you can run a web scraper at a minimal cost.

Web scraping is scalable
The sheer amount of data on the internet makes the manual parsing of all data a significant task. As your data scraping needs grow, a team of researchers simply can’t manage to process all the data in a timely fashion.

Web scraping is a software solution that can be run 24/7, and scale as much as your business requires.

Web scraping is flexible and versatile
At its core, web scraping is about taking data in one format (i.e., HTML on a website) and converting it into another format. You could store the data in a spreadsheet, or send the data directly to other software applications in real-time.

For example, you could use web scraping to pull prices from multiple websites at once, and display these prices on your price comparison website.

Web scraping has minimum maintenance costs
Once you’ve set up your web scraping system, you rarely need to maintain it or modify how it works. This makes web scraping an economical option compared to traditional ways of researching data online.

In some cases, you could tweak the types of information your web scraping tools pull from websites, but this only requires changing a few software settings.

ScrapingBee Scraping test

ScrapingBee offers a versatile data extraction API as one of its primary services, allowing users to extract data from a wide range of web pages. To evaluate its capabilities, I decided to scrape Amazon.com , a well-known website notorious for implementing sophisticated anti-bot systems.

Navigating through ScrapingBee's API was straightforward, and the ScrapingBee documentation provided clear and updated information. With just a few lines of code, as shown in the example below, I successfully extracted the titles, prices, and links of the iPhones listed on the first page of Amazon.com :

from scrapingbee import ScrapingBeeClient # Importing SPB's client client = ScrapingBeeClient(api_key='YOUR_API_KEY') response = client.get("", params={ 'extract_rules':{ "product-titles": { "selector": "div.a-section.a-spacing-none.puis-padding-right-small.s-title-instructions-style > h2 > a > span", "type": "list", }, "product-prices": { "selector": "div.a-section.a-spacing-none.a-spacing-top-micro.puis-price-instructions-style > div > a > span > span.a-offscreen", "type": "list", }, "product-links": { "selector": "div.a-section.a-spacing-none.puis-padding-right-small.s-title-instructions-style > h2 > a", "type": "list", "output": "@href" }, } }) if response.ok: print(response.json())

If you want to test the provided code yourself, follow these steps:

1. Create a ScrapingBee account.
2. Replace the placeholder text in the code with your own ScrapingBee API key.

Web Scraping api free. What is the difference between Web Scraping tools and Web Scraping techniques?

Web scraping is a rather new and dynamically evolving area, so when just starting to explore this subject, very often people find answers on the internet that might be quite confusing. That’s why it is important to use the right terms when talking about web scraping. For example, users sometimes confuse web scraping technologies or techniques with web scraping tools, services and platforms. Sometimes you may even find a web scraping company listed as a tool or service. So let’s clear the air here.

A web scraping tool is a piece of software that does the job of collecting and delivering data for you; it can also be called a web scraper, or web scraping API. Don’t let the abbreviation intimidate you, an API, or application programming interface, is simply a way for the web scraper to communicate with the website it’s collecting data from. That’s why you can often find the word API standing right next to the names of some of the biggest websites: e.g. Google Maps API, Aliexpress API, Instagram API, and so on. In a way, “Amazon API” and “Amazon Scraper” mean the same thing. Here’s an example of a web scraping tool. This Twitter Scraper effectively acts as an unofficial Twitter API.

A web scraping platform is a unifying cloud-based structure where all these scraping tools are maintained and where a user can tune them according to their needs. The platform - if it’s a good one - also serves as a channel of communication between the company and the users, where registered users can leave their feedback and report issues so the company can improve on their scraping services. An example of this could be our Apify platform, including the Twitter scraping tool. There you can search through all the scrapers as well as organize and schedule the way they work according to your needs.  

A web scraping technique is the way a scraper executes its job; an approach or a method for the scraper to get the data from the webpage.

What is the difference between Web Scraping tools and Web Scraping techniques?

Web scraping is a rapidly evolving field, and when first exploring this subject, it's common to find confusing answers online. That's why it's crucial to use the correct terminology when discussing web scraping. For instance, users often confuse web scraping technologies or techniques with web scraping tools, services, and platforms. Sometimes, you may even come across a web scraping company listed as a tool or service. So, let's clear the air here.

A web scraping platform is a cloud-based structure that unifies all these scraping tools, allowing users to customize them according to their needs. A good platform also serves as a channel of communication between the company and users, enabling registered users to leave feedback and report issues, which the company can then use to improve its services. An example of this is our Apify platform, which includes the Twitter scraping tool. With our platform, you can search through all the scrapers and organize and schedule their work according to your needs.

A web scraping technique, on the other hand, refers to the way a scraper executes its job; an approach or method for the scraper to obtain data from a webpage.

Источник: https://lajfhak.ru-land.com/stati/10-best-web-scraping-apis-data-extraction-2022-top-10-best-web-scraping-tools-data-extraction

Rayobyte Scraping robot. Role of Web Scraping in Compiling Auction Data

Web scraping is a helpful tool for buyers looking for specific items. Auction websites typically have terms of service prohibiting the scraping of private data. You can quickly and efficiently compile data from these different sites by scraping auction websites. This data can be used to track and manage your auction items.

When you’re web scraping for auction data, there are a few things to keep in mind. First, you’ll want to ensure that you’re only scraping publicly available data. Second, you’ll want to ensure that you’re scraping data in a way that doesn’t violate the terms of service of the auction website.

You can build your own web scraper, but if you’re looking for a more efficient option Scraping Robot might be the option for you! Scraping Robot makes using the data your scraper collects easy by providing structured JSON output of a parsed website’s metadata. Then, you can feed that information directly into your website or database. You won’t need to worry about IP blocks, CAPTCHAs, or managing proxies. Scraping Robot handles these details on your behalf. In addition, they have a reliable support system and 24/7 customer assistance.

Finally, you’ll want to ensure you’re using a proxy server to avoid getting banned from the site. This is where proxies come in.

Proxies for auction data scraping

A proxy server is a server that acts as an intermediary between your computer and the internet. When you use a proxy server, your IP address is shielded from the sites you visit. This helps protect your identity and prevent your internet activity from being tracked.

Proxies are especially important when web scraping for auction data. Auction websites typically have terms of service prohibiting the scraping of private data. If you scrape data from these sites without a proxy, you risk getting banned from the site. A proxy will help to protect your identity and prevent your internet activity from being tracked.

Web Scraping using api. A brief introduction to APIs ¶

---

In this section, we will take a look at an alternative way to gather data than the previous pattern based HTML scraping. Sometimes websites offer an API (or Application Programming Interface) as a service which provides a high level interface to directly retrieve data from their repositories or databases at the backend.

From Wikipedia,

" An API is typically defined as a set of specifications, such as Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) request messages, along with a definition of the structure of response messages, usually in an Extensible Markup Language (XML) or JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format. "

They typically tend to be URL endpoints (to be fired as requests) that need to be modified based on our requirements (what we desire in the response body) which then returns some a payload (data) within the response, formatted as either JSON, XML or HTML.

A popular web architecture style calledREST(or representational state transfer) allows users to interact with web services viaGETandPOSTcalls (two most commonly used) which we briefly saw in the previous section.

For example, Twitter's REST API allows developers to access core Twitter data and the Search API provides methods for developers to interact with Twitter Search and trends data.

There are primarily two ways to use APIs :

• Through the command terminal using URL endpoints, or
• Through programming language specific wrappers

For example,Tweepyis a famous python wrapper for Twitter API whereastwurlis a command line interface (CLI) tool but both can achieve the same outcomes.

Here we focus on the latter approach and will use a Python library (a wrapper) calledwptoolsbased around the original MediaWiki API.

One advantage of using official APIs is that they are usually compliant of the terms of service (ToS) of a particular service that researchers are looking to gather data from. However, third-party libraries or packages which claim to provide more throughput than the official APIs (rate limits, number of requests/sec) generally operate in a gray area as they tend to violate ToS. Always be sure to read their documentation throughly.