Use the Right Web Scraper Software and Save Precious Time and Effort

The Web is a mine of information. Students, researchers, business organizations and

individuals find information of their choice on different websites. The only problem a

person faces is that he has to navigate hundreds of links in order to compile all the data he

needs. The manual method is to visit each web page, copy the required material and paste

it either into a worksheet, notepad or Word document. This is not only time consuming

but it also requires a great deal of effort because one website may have hundreds of

pages.

Those with some knowledge of UNIX or HTTP programming can use their skills to

extract data from websites by posting specific requests. Then you have web browsers

such as Chrome and Firefox that may have add-ons and extensions that allow you to

download web pages or even the entire contents of a website. The problems common

users come up against are that some web pages are protected against copying and

intrusions.

In these circumstances the best recourse is to go in for web scraping. Web scraping is an

automatic method to collect information using web technologies with varying degrees of

automation. Anyone wishing to download a whole lot of information is better off with

web scraper software. There are paid versions as well as open source web scrapers.

As is to be expected free versions are limited in functionality and features. It is best to

buy full featured software from expert developers specializing in this technology. This

utility should be fully customizable to let you set parameters on the data you wish to

extract and then, with a click of the button, the extraction process starts. Users simply

launch the application and specify their choice of web scraping patterns and let the

software do the rest. A package that offers the widest range of options is the one to select

so that unnecessary data is not downloaded and you save on bandwidth usage, costs and

time you spend in downloading as well as editing data.

A few of these packages are not able to access all types of websites. Users need to be

aware that full featured software must be able to access any type of website and extract

any type of data and then export it into the format of their choice, be it .txt, HTML, SQL

script, csv or any other popular format that makes it easier to analyze such data in the

quickest possible way.

Not everyone is a computer wizard and for those unfamiliar with the technology, the

software they select must be simple. All users need to do is enter the basic URL and let

the package do the rest or specify a few more rules before clicking “go”. Just as all

computer users are not equal, all scraping software also are not equal. Some will do it

sequentially, which means it will take a long time to access all pages and download data

one by one. Better and more efficient web scraper software will run multi-threaded

sessions, accessing and downloading 20 pages simultaneously.

Anyone doing serious work in which the Web figures prominently must have a suitable

extractor and thus improve productivity and efficiency.

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