How to Scrape Data from Craigslist | Octoparse
Table of Contents
1. Why do people scrape Craigslist
2. Is scraping Craigslist illegal
3. How to scrape data from Craigslist
4. Craigslist data scraping with Octoparse
5. Closing thoughts
Why do people scrape Craigslist?
Craigslist gathers expansive information. Some may not be satisfied just browsing it, they scrape data from Craigslist for a variety of reasons. Below are the typical 4 of them.
1> Individuals can extract first-hand information regarding houses, cars, computers and many more. When exported into excel sheets, it is much easier for them to look through and compare the data.
2> Craigslist, similar to Yellowpages and Yelp, is full of potential business leads for revenue generation. No doubt that leads are important, especially qualified ones. This is probably the reason why Craigslist appeals to so many people.
3> Gain profits by reselling goods. With scraped data in a well structure, people can better analyze prices and set a new one for reselling. However, reselling is rather in the gray area, thus this might not be a good try. It’s profitable sometimes, but the consequences may not be delightful.
4> Monitor competitors. Craigslist is full of precious information covering an array of industries where people can keep track of their competitors. Being informed of their strategies in real-time will help businesses gain an edge in competition.
Is scraping Craigslist illegal?
As one of the most popular websites out there to scrape, Craigslist has proved to be one of the toughest ones. The reason is simple: unlike websites that provide users with APIs to get data, Craigslist API is not aimed at pulling data off. Quite on the contrary, it is used for posting data on Craigslist.
Just like Facebook and LinkedIn, Craigslist’s terms clearly state that all sorts of robots, spiders, scripts, scrapers, crawlers are prohibited. And they won’t allow people to steal their users’ personal information on the site.
Craigslist has used various technological and legal methods to prevent being scraped for commercial purposes. In fact, in April 2017, Craigslist obtained a $60. 5 million judgment against 3 Taps Inc, a company that is accused of scraping real estate listings. A few months later, Craigslist reached another $31 million judgment with Instamotor, claiming that Instamotor’s car listing service was scraped from Craigslist, and they sent unsolicited emails to craigslist users for promotional purposes.
Nevertheless, as said in an article entitled 10 Myths about Web Scraping, it is illegal if you scrape confidential information for profit, but if you scrape public data discreetly for personal use, you should be fine.
How to scrape data from Craigslist?
If you are a coder, you can follow this Python tutorial on scraping East Bay Area Craigslist for apartments. The code in this tutorial can be modified to pull from any region, category, property type, etc. Or you can check out this Scrapy tutorial to learn to crawl Craigslist’s “Architecture & Engineering” jobs in New York and store the data to a CSV file.
But the problem with the above tutorials are obvious: they are way too complicated for non-coders. If you have zero coding experience and want a simple and quick method, here’s a catch – use an automated data scraping tool like Octoparse.
With the power of data scraping, we can extract all the info we want from Craigslist listings within clicks and export them into Excel, CSV, HTML, and/or databases easily. I will walk you through how to extract Craigslist real estate listings within 3 steps.
Real estate listing extracted from Craigslist
Craigslist data scraping with Octoparse
In this case, let’s scrape the housing/real estate for sale in Chicago. First thing first, install Octoparse and launch it on your computer.
Step 1: Enter the target Craigslist URL to build a crawler
Enter the listing URL into the box, and Octoparse will start detecting the page data automatically. As you can see, the data to be extracted is highlighted in red, and the preview section below allows you to pre-edit the data fields.
Step 2: Save the extraction setting
After making sure that the data fields are what we want, click “Save settings” and Octoparse will auto-generate a scraping workflow on the left-hand side.
Step 3: Run the extraction to get data
Finally, you only need to save the crawler and hit “Run” to start extraction. The scraping process can be done within 5 minutes.
Closing thoughts
Please note that even though this article guides you through extracting Craigslist data, you should always respect its Terms of Service and scrape at a moderate frequency.
Data scraping tools can not only scrape all Craigslist listings, but also they are used in many scenarios, including Marketing, E-commerce and Retail, Data Science, Equity and Financial Research, Data Journalism, Academic, Risk management, Insurance and many more. You can read about web scraping uses in business in this article: 25 Hacks to Grow Your Business With Web Data Extraction.
Author: Milly
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Ending Data Scraping Dispute, Craigslist Reaches $31M …
Craigslist has used a variety of technological and legal methods to prevent unauthorized parties from violating its terms of use by scraping, linking to, or accessing user postings for their own commercial purposes. For example, in April, craigslist obtained a $60. 5 million judgment against a real estate listings site that had allegedly received scraped craigslist data from another entity. And craigslist recently reached a $31 million settlement and stipulated judgment with Instamotor, an online and app-based used car listing service, over claims that Instamotor scraped craigslist content to create listings on its own service and sent unsolicited emails to craigslist users for promotional purposes. (Craigslist, Inc. v. Instamotor, Inc., No. 17-02449 (Stipulated Judgment and Permanent Injunction Aug. 3, 2017)).
In its complaint, craigslist alleged that Instamotor violated craigslist’s terms of use by scraping user content from craigslist’s site to populate used car listings on its own service. Craigslist alleged that this caused complaints from craigslist users who listed their vehicles for sale exclusively on craigslist, only to later discover that their listings and contact information were being posted on Instamotor without their consent.
Craigslist also alleged that Instamotor sent unsolicited commercial emails to promote its services through craigslist’s system to users whose listings were scraped (Instamotor purportedly used a “white-listed mail service…disguising the messages’ true origin” to bypass craigslist spam prevention tools). In fact, craigslist alleged that defendant hired a team based in the Philippines to extract content, send emails to craigslist users to seek additional information about their user car listings without disclosing their affiliation with Instamotor.
The complaint further alleged that Instamotor had posted at least fifty ads to craigslist, thereby affirmatively agreeing to craigslist’s terms of use. Craigslist’s terms of use, among other things, prohibits “robots, spiders, scripts, scrapers, crawlers, etc., ” along with “misleading, unsolicited, unlawful, and/or spam postings/email. ”
Based on the foregoing, craigslist brought multiple claims including breach of contract and CAN-SPAM (and related claims under state anti-spam law), and sought an injunction prohibiting Instamotor from scraping craigslist’s site and sending its users spam. Craigslist did not allege a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (the “CFAA”). The timing is interesting, as shortly after this stipulated judgment was entered, the Northern District of California granted a preliminary injunction against LinkedIn, finding that LinkedIn was unlikely to prevail against a data scraper on a CFAA claim. (See hiQ Labs, Inc. LinkedIn, Corp., 2017 WL 3473663 (N. D. Cal. Aug. 14, 2017)).
As part of the stipulated judgment, Instamotor agreed to a $31 million monetary judgment for breach of craigslist’s terms of use and violations of CAN-SPAM. It also agreed to a permanent injunction barring it, or a third party on its behalf, from accessing, scraping or harvesting craigslist content via automated means and thereafter distributing craigslist content and user information. Interestingly, the stipulation expressly states there are no exceptions for prohibited access and use of craigslist data, including any claims of fair use or implied license. The injunction also bars defendant from “directly or indirectly circumventing technological measures that control access to any craigslist website, ” including IP address blocks and sets of instructions communicated via files. In addition, the defendant, or a third party acting on its behalf, is prohibited from sending or paying others to send spam emails to any craigslist email addresses, user, member or poster in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act. Lastly, the defendant agreed to delete any craigslist data in its possession.
With this latest litigation victory by craigslist, particularly in view of the decision in LinkedIn, the law surrounding data scraping continues to evolve. As articulated in LinkedIn, many advocate that content on publicly-available websites is implicitly free to harvest and exploit, while web services hosting valuable user-generated content or other data typically wish to exercise control over which parties can access and use it for commercial purposes. Moreover, hedge fund managers and other investors are increasingly collecting and analyzing big data to discover usable investment insights, including such data obtained from web scraping. If anything, this latest settlement should inform entities involved in scraping activities of the importance of understanding the range of prohibitions contained in a website or app’s terms of use, the effect of opening an account and agreeing to a site’s terms, and the possible legal issues that can arise when a site’s technical protective measures are bypassed.
Tags: injunction, judgment, mobile app, screen scraping, spam, web scraping
Is Web Scraping Legal? 6 Misunderstandings About Web …
Hey guys, in my experience as a web scraping developer, I have come across so many misconceptions about web scraping. Because the reputation of web scraping has continued to get worse over the years, let’s shed light on some of the biggest misunderstandings about web scraping. Read the article or watch the video then let me know what else you would add to the list!
As web scraping is becoming more and more popular I think we need to get things straight. After a little research on the internet and considering the questions I often get asked, I’ve found that these six misconceptions are the most common about web scraping. If you are totally new to web scraping or you consider leveraging it the followings should be helpful for you.
Web scraping is illegal
Starting with the biggest BS around web scraping. Is web scraping legal? Yes, unless you use it unethically. Web scraping is just like any tool in the world. You can use it for good stuff and you can use it for bad stuff. Web scraping itself is not illegal. As a matter of fact, web scraping – or web crawling, were historically associated with well-known search engines like Google or Bing. These search engines crawl sites and index the web. Because these search engines built trust and brought back traffic and visibility to the sites they crawled, their bots created a favorable view towards web scraping. It is all about how you web scrape and what you do with the data you acquire.
A great example when web scraping can be illegal is when you try to scrape nonpublic data. Nonpublic data can be something that is not reachable for everyone on the web. Maybe you have to login to see the data. In this case web scraping is probably unethical, depending on the context. Also it does matter how nice you are technically when scraping a website. To learn more, I urge you to check out the most frequent legal issues associated with web scraping!
You need to code
Some people think that you need to be an expert programmer to scrape web data. However, there are software solutions out there like that make it so you don’t have to write any code. Also keep in mind that though scraping a website without coding is great but it’s not applicable in many cases. If you have to further process data (cleaning, deduplication, etc.. ) a web scraping software can’t really help you.
Web scraping projects traditionally are known to be labor intensive, leaving you with data that’s incomplete, inaccurate, unreliable, and out of date—while introducing high costs and business risk. ’s Web Data Integration removes this complexity and unifies fragmented data from across the internet into something you can trust.
Web scraping is cheap
Most people and businesses don’t want to deal with web scraping themselves. It is quite frequent that they hire a company that provides web scraping solutions or a freelancer. Now, just to get this straight, web scraping is cheap regarding the ROI it provides in most cases. At the same time, you should know that hiring a full-fledged web scraping service is gonna cost you money. If you do a quick research how much different vendors and freelancers charge for web scraping services you will find a huge difference. It’s because some companies and freelancers with higher rates do provide better services.
Also, you should figure out how complex your project is. For large, long-term projects I suggest hiring a vendor because they usually guarantee you’ll get your data every time on time. Also some web scraping companies provides additional useful services like further processing data to fit into your system. Once you figure out what your web data needs are, see how ’s Managed Data Service can help you solve your most complex, high-scale, high quality needs for web data.
The web scraper works forever
When building a scraper, we want it to work seamlessly forever and just deliver the data we need. Unfortunately it’s not that easy. The biggest challenge in web scraping is that websites are constantly changing. This is the nature of the current state of the internet. To keep up, we should always adjust our scraper so we can trust it delivers reliable and up-to-date data. Now, if you just setup your scraper with a freelancer dude then it’s gonna be a headache when the scraper wrecks(and it will sooner or later unfortunately) because you need to find another freelancer to make it work again or if you’re lucky the one who built the scraper is available at the moment.
You’re in a good position if you’re using a web scraping service because the vendor will take care of all the problems you will not even realize anything. The data is flowing as usual. So just keep in mind that if you need continuous data flowing into your system, you’ll need to watch your scraper and adjust if it wrecks.
Web scraping is all about selecting data from the HTML
This one is a myth often told by programmers who have never built a real world web scraper. I’ve heard this one soo many times. Like “It’s no big deal bro just write a regex and fetch the data from the html and you’re done. ” Sure web scraping is associated with fetching data from a website but the thing is what really matters is how you can use that data to drive your business. Web scraping is much more than getting raw data out of a website.
Web scraping – when done correctly – involves cleaning messy data(because 99% of the time raw data from the web is plain unusable), deduplication, all sort of filtering, integration with your current system, maybe analytics and visualization. It’s complex. Now you might say that hey at the end of the day you just want to see the raw data you don’t need any of the stuff just mentioned. That’s cool. But there’s a chance you’re leaving behind a massive amount of value on the table by not processing the data further.
Any website can be scraped
Website owners can make it really hard for bots to scrape data. There’s a bunch of ways to make a website scraping-proof. Although in reality, there’s no technical shield that could stop a full-fledged scraper from fetching data.
That being said, if the website has lots of scraper traps, captchas and other layers of defense against bots then surely web scraping is not welcomed there. In that case, you should think twice about it before scraping the website. Technically it’s possible to fight all types of bot defenses but do you really want? If the website proactively steps up against scrapers then it’s not a good idea to scrape it anyway.
Conclusion
Web data scraping and crawling aren’t illegal by themselves, but it is important to be ethical while doing it. Don’t tread onto other people’s sites without being considerate. Respect the rules of their site. Consider reading over their Terms of Service, read the file. If you suspect a site is preventing you from crawling, consider contacting the webmaster and asking permission to crawl their site. Don’t burn out their bandwidth–try using a slower crawl rate (like 1 request per 10-15 seconds). Don’t publish any content you find that was not intended to be published.
Web scraping has helped us make the best use of the web with services like Google and Bing search engines. It is a powerful tool that helps businesses leverage the data of the internet, but should be done respectfully.
Of course there are more things I could mention today I just wanted to tell you about the ones that I got the most and feel like these are the most crucial when it comes to leveraging web scraping. Comment below I would be glad to hear your thoughts!
Frequently Asked Questions about craigslist scrapper
What is Craigslist scraping?
Craigslist has used a variety of technological and legal methods to prevent unauthorized parties from violating its terms of use by scraping, linking to, or accessing user postings for their own commercial purposes.Aug 24, 2017
Is Web scraping a crime?
Web scraping itself is not illegal. As a matter of fact, web scraping – or web crawling, were historically associated with well-known search engines like Google or Bing. These search engines crawl sites and index the web. … A great example when web scraping can be illegal is when you try to scrape nonpublic data.Nov 17, 2017
Is Facebook scraper legal?
The lines state that Facebook prohibits all automated scrapers. That is, no part of the website should be visited by an automated crawler.Aug 12, 2021