Top 13 web Scraping Tools in 2023. So what does a web scraper do?

In data mining, whether it’s preventing your IP address from being banned, crawling the original website properly, generating data in a compatible format, or cleaning up the data, many sub-processes are in progress. Fortunately, web scrapers and data scraping tools make this process simple, fast, and reliable.

Often, the online information to be retrieved is too large to be retrieved manually. This is why companies using web scraping tools can collect more data in less time and at a lower cost.
In addition, companies that profit from data scraping take a step forward in competing against competitors over the long term.

In this article, you will find a list of the top 13 best web scraping tools compared based on their features, price, and ease of use.

13 Best Web Scraping Tools Here’s a list of the best web scraping tools:

- Luminati (BrightData)
- Scrapingdog
- Newsdata.io
- AvesAPI
- ParseHub
- Diffbot
- Octoparse
- ScrapingBee
- Scrape.do
- Grepsr
- Scraper API
- Scrapy
- Import.io

The Web Scraper Tools search for new data either manually or automatically. They retrieve updated or new data and then archive it for easy access. These tools are useful for anyone trying to collect data on the Internet.

For example, web scraping tools can be used to collect real estate data, hotel data from major travel portals, products, pricing and review data for e-commerce websites, etc. . So basically if you are wondering ‘where can you scrape data’ these are data scraping tools.

Web scraper инструкция. Scrape Options

All of the following features are available to customize a web scrape on the Scrape Options tab.

Scrape Name the name of the scrape.

Follow Links provides the following options on how the scraper should follow links:

as required - the default setting and safest option, this will make the scraper only follow links it is instructed to
all pages - the scraper will follow every link it finds
first page - only follow the links found on the first page, specified as the target
up to n pages from initial page - only follow links on pages the specified number of clicks from the first page
in frames - follow links found in frames and iframes

Ignore File Downloads once set any links, which cause a file download when visited are not downloaded.

Ignore Duplicates if set it will ignore pages that are equal to or more than the similarity you set, for instance you could ignore pages that are 95% the same.

Limit Scrape allows you to specify how many pages the web scraper should scrape before stopping.

Use My Timezone if set it indicates that the Web Scraper should attempt to convert any dates it scrapes into your local time zone. Your time zone can be set on the account page.

Location the geographic location the Web Scraper will perform the scrape from. This could be useful if the target website has restrictions based on location.

Default Date Format when converting dates where the date format can not be determined, the Web Scraper will instead default to this chosen format.

Page Load Delay this is the time in milliseconds the Web Scraper should wait before parsing a page. This is very useful if a page contains a lot of AJAX or is slow to load.

Web Scraping test. Web Scraping Tools

This is the most popular web scraping method where a business deploys an already made software for all their web scraping use cases.

If you want to access and gather data at scale, you need good web scraping tools that can surpass IP blocking, cloaking, and ReCaptcha. There are popular tools such as Scrapy, Beautiful Soup, Scrapebox, Scrapy Proxy Middleware, Octoparse, Parsehub, and Apify.

These tools help you with your web scraping task at scale and can surpass different obstacles to help you achieve your goals.

Selenium is a popular open-source web automation framework used for automated browser testing . This framework helps you write Selenium test scripts that can be used to automate testing of websites and web applications, then execute them in different browsers on multiple platforms using any programming language of your choice. However, it can be adapted to solve dynamic web scraping problems, as we will demonstrate in the blog on how you can do web scraping using JavaScript and Selenium.

Selenium has three major components:

Selenium IDE : It is a browser plugin – a faster, easier way to create, execute, and debug your Selenium scripts.
Selenium WebDriver: It is a set of portable APIs that help you write automated tests in any language that runs on top of your browser.
Selenium Grid: It automates the process of distributing and scaling tests across multiple browsers, operating systems, and platforms.

Scrape do. Scrape.do

Scrape.do — удобный инструмент веб-скрейпинга, предоставляющий масштабируемый, быстрый и проксируемый API веб-парсинг с конечной точкой обработки запросов. Благодаря хорошему соотношению стоимости к результативности и своим возможностям Scrape.do находится на верхней позиции данного списка. Прочитайте этот пост целиком, и вы поймете, что Scrape.do — это один из наиболее дешевых инструментов парсинга.

В отличие от своих конкурентов, Scrape.do не требует дополнительную плату за работу с Google и другими сложными для скрейпинга сайтами. Этот инструмент предлагает лучшее соотношение цены и производительности на рынке для парсинга Google (5 000 000 страниц поисковой выдачи за $249). Вдобавок средняя скорость Scrape.do при сборе анонимных данных из Instagram составляет 2-3 секунды, а вероятность успеха — 99 процентов. Также его скорость шлюза в четыре раза выше скорости конкурентов. Более того, этот инструмент предлагает доступ к резидентным и мобильным прокси в два раза дешевле.

Ниже перечислены некоторые из других возможностей.

Возможности

Прокси-серверы с ротацией IP-адресов, позволяющие собирать данные на любом веб-сайте. Scrape.do циклически меняет IP-адреса при выполнении каждого запроса к API , используя свой пул прокси-серверов .
Неограниченная пропускная способность на любом тарифном плане.
Инструмент можно полностью настроить под ваши нужды.
Плата взимается только за успешные запросы.
Возможность геотаргетинга, позволяющая выбирать из более чем 10 стран.
Выполнение JavaScript кода, что позволяет собирать данные с веб-страниц, на которых для отображения данных используется JavaScript .
Возможность задействовать функцию «Исключительный прокси» (параметр «super»), что дает возможность собирать данные с веб-сайтов , обладающих защитой на основе списка IP-адресов центров обработки данных.

Стоимость: тарифные планы начинаются со стоимости $29/месяц. Профессиональный план (Pro) стоит $99/месяц за 1 300 000 запросов к API .

Scraping bot. Method 1: Using Selenium

We need to install ato automate using selenium, our task is to create a bot that will be continuously scraping the google news website and display all the headlines every 10mins.

Stepwise implementation:

Step 1:

The next step is to open the required website.

# path of the chromedriver we have just downloaded

PATH=r"D:\chromedriver"

driver=webdriver.Chrome(PATH)# to open the browser

# url of google news website

url=' https://news.google.com/topstories?hl=en-IN&gl=IN&ceid=IN:en '

# to open the url in the browser

driver.get(url)

Output:

Step 3: Extracting the news title from the webpage, to extract a specific part of the page, we need its XPath, which can be accessed by right-clicking on the required element and selecting Inspect in the dropdown bar.

After clicking Inspect a window appears. From there, we have to copy the elements full XPath to access it:

Note: You might not always get the exact element that you want by inspecting (depends on the structure of the website), so you may have to surf the HTML code for a while to get the exact element you want. And now, just copy that path and paste that into your code. After running all these lines of code, you will get the title of the first heading printed on your terminal.

Python3

# Xpath you just copied

news_path='/html/body/c-wiz/div/

div/main/c-wiz/div1>/div

# to get that element

link=driver.find_element_by_xpath(news_path)

# to read the text from that element

print(link.text)

Output:

‘Attack on Afghan territory’: Taliban on US airstrike that killed 2 ISIS-K men

Step 4: Now, the target is to get the X_Paths of all the headlines present.

One way is that we can copy all the XPaths of all the headlines (about 6 headlines will be there in google news every time) and we can fetch all those, but that method is not suited if there are a large number of things to be scrapped. So, the elegant way is to find the pattern of the XPaths of the titles which will make our tasks way easier and efficient. Below are the XPaths of all the headlines on the website, and let’s figure out the pattern.

/html/body/c-wiz/div/div/div/div/main/c-wiz/div/div/div/div/article/h3/a

So, by seeing these XPath’s, we can see that only the 5th div is changing (bolded ones). So based upon this, we can generate the XPaths of all the headlines. We will get all the titles from the page by accessing them with their XPath. So to extract all these, we have the code as

Now, the code is almost complete, the last thing we have to do is that the code should get headlines for every 10 mins. So we will run a while loop and sleep for 10 mins after getting all the headlines.

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Web scraper tutorial. BeautifulSoup Library

BeautifulSoup is used extract information from the HTML and XML files. It provides a parse tree and the functions to navigate, search or modify this parse tree.

Beautiful Soup is a Python library used to pull the data out of HTML and XML files for web scraping purposes. It produces a parse tree from page source code that can be utilized to drag data hierarchically and more legibly.

Features of Beautiful Soup

Beautiful Soup is a Python library developed for quick reversal projects like screen-scraping. Three features make it powerful:

1. Beautiful Soup provides a few simple methods and Pythonic phrases for guiding, searching, and changing a parse tree: a toolkit for studying a document and removing what you need. It doesn’t take much code to document an application.

2. Beautiful Soup automatically converts incoming records to Unicode and outgoing forms to UTF-8. You don’t have to think about encodings unless the document doesn’t define an encoding, and Beautiful Soup can’t catch one. Then you just have to choose the original encoding.

3. Beautiful Soup sits on top of famous Python parsers like LXML and HTML, allowing you to try different parsing strategies or trade speed for flexibility.

Web scraper Online. 13 Best Web Scraping Tools & Software to Extract Online Data in 2023

Data Scraping Tools & Web scrapers

Data scraping tools are the need in the 21st century as we approach a world where data is the fuel for every domain.

Throughout my career, I’ve tried and tested different web scraping software. Some of these website scraping tools were trash (don’t worry I haven’t included them in this post), while others were the real deal.

If you don’t want to waste your time hopping around for the best web scraping tool, then keep reading because in this post you’ll learn which online web scraper is best for your needs.

But before diving into some of the most popular web data scraping tools, let’s understand what web scraping is.

What Web Scraping is & Why Use Web Scraping Tools & Software

Web scraping is the art of extracting or harvesting data through web pages via different means. The data pulled is then put in a format that is more understandable to the end user.

And many more!! There could be endless use cases of web scraping. Each industry can leverage maximum when they extract data from their niche market.

List of Top 13 Web Scraping Tools

is a very high-end web data scraping program that provides millions of proxies for scraping. It offers data scraping services with capabilities like rendering JavaScript & bypassing captchas. Scrapingdog offers two kinds of solutions:

is built for users with less technical knowledge. As you can see in the above image you can manually adjust almost anything from rendering JavaScript to handling premium proxies. This software also provides structured data in JSON format if you specify particular tags & attributes of the data you are trying to scrape.
API is built for developers. You will be able to scrape websites by just mentioning queries inside the API URI. You can read its. Their interactive API makes them one of the best scrapers out there in the market right now.

Pros

Provide a generous free pack with 1000 API calls.
Scraper is the fastest in the market.
The success rate for major websites like amazon.com is close to 99%.

Cons

Suitable for users with little to advanced knowledge of programming. Non-developers cannot use Scrapingdog.

9/10

ScraperAPI

ScraperAPI is another online web scraper that can help you scrape any website in just a single GET request. They also provide datacenter and residential proxies. If you have your own scraper then you can use those proxies to avoid getting blocked while scraping at scale. You can use their free version to test how it works for your purpose.

Pros

Provides a free pack with 5000 API calls.
The documentation is available in multiple languages.
Great Support

Cons

Up-time is very poor. Randomly server keeps crashing.
Scraping websites like amazon, indeed, etc are quite expensive. Scraping these will cost you 5 scraping credits per page.
Does not work on many websites like indeed, google, etc.

Scrapingbee

Scrapingbee Web Scraping Tool

Scrapingbee is one of the most popular web scraping tools at present. It can help you scrape any website with ease. You can scroll down, take complete page screenshots, etc. It is a feature-loaded web scraping API. They too provide a free version and it comes with 1000 API credits.

Data Scraping. How To Scrape Data from a Website

Web scraping has existed for a long time and, in its good form, it is a key underpinning of the internet.

Web scraping can be used in a variety of situations, especially when information is needed in bulk and there is no API to access it from.

Considering the amount of information available on the internet today, access to these information have been relatively easier these past few years due to the availability of broadband internet and internet connection reaching even rural areas. The main problem has been collecting data in bulk, organizing it and analyzing it.

Web scraping automatically extracts data and presents it in a format you can easily make sense of.

We’ll be making use of Python programming language for data scraping because:

it has the largest community support for scraping, data science and the likes
it is easy to learn

Python comes pre-installed on Mac OS X but for Windows user, you’ll have to install it via the official website. We’ll be making use ofPython2.

A prerequisite for scraping data from websites is basic knowledge of HTML. HTML is the standard markup language for creating web pages and it is used to define structures of content on web pages. You have to understand how these contents are structured to be able to know where and how to get them.
You can take a quick HTML introduction course on W3Schools if you need a refresher.

Many languages have libraries and pieces of software already written that will help you with the task of web scraping. However, with Python, scraping is relatively as easy as writingif…elsestatements.

Let’s take a look at the libraries we’ll be using for scraping:

Jupyter Notebook — The Jupyter Notebook is an open-source web application that allows you to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations and narrative text. I’ll be sharing the code used in this tutorial via a Jupyter Notebook hosted on Github!
requests — this library makes dealing with HTTP requests simple. Why do you need to deal with HTTP requests? Because they are what your web browser sends in the background when it wants to retrieve a page from the internet.
BeautifulSoup — This is a Python library that handles extracting the relevant data from HTML and XML. You can read more on the installation and how to use BeautifulSoup here .

Next, we need to get the BeautifulSoup library using Python’s package management tool known aspip.

In the terminal (or command prompt for Windows users), type:

pip install bs4 requests

Some rules to take note of before scraping:

You should check a website’s Terms and Conditions before you scrape it. Be careful to read the statements about the legal use of data. Usually, the data you scrape should not be used for commercial purposes.
Do not request data from the website too aggressively with your program (also known as spamming), as this may break the website. Make sure your program behaves in a reasonable manner (i.e. acts like a human). One request for one webpage per second is good practice.
The layout of a website may change from time to time, so make sure to revisit the site and rewrite your code as needed.