Web Scraper – The #1 web scraping extension
More than
400, 000 users are proud of using our solutions!
Point and click
interface
Our goal is to make web data extraction as simple as possible.
Configure scraper by simply pointing and clicking on elements.
No coding required.
Extract data from dynamic
web sites
Web Scraper can extract data from sites with multiple levels of navigation. It can navigate a
website on all levels.
Categories and subcategories
Pagination
Product pages
Built for the modern web
Websites today are built on top of JavaScript frameworks that make user interface easier to use but
are less accessible to scrapers. Web Scraper solves this by:
Full JavaScript execution
Waiting for Ajax requests
Pagination handlers
Page scroll down
Modular selector system
Web Scraper allows you to build Site Maps from different types of selectors.
This system makes it possible to tailor data extraction to different site structures.
Export data in CSV, XLSX and JSON
formats
Build scrapers, scrape sites and export data in CSV format directly from your browser.
Use Web Scraper Cloud to export data in CSV, XLSX and JSON formats, access it via API, webhooks or
get it exported via Dropbox.
Diego Kremer
Simply AMAZING. Was thinking about coding myself a simple scraper for a project
and then found this super easy to use and very powerful scraper. Worked
perfectly with all the websites I tried on. Saves a lot of time. Thanks for
that!
Carlos Figueroa
Powerful tool that beats the others out there. Has a learning curve to it but
once you conquer that the sky’s the limit. Definitely a tool worth making a
donation on and supporting for continued development. Way to go for the
authoring crew behind this tool.
Jonathan H
This is fantastic! I’m saving hours, possibly days. I was trying to scrap and old
site, badly made, no proper divs or markup.
Using the WebScraper magic, it somehow “knew” the pattern after I selected 2
elements. Amazing.
Yes, it’s a learning curve and you HAVE to watch the video and read the docs.
Don’t rate it down just because you can’t be bothered to learn it. If you put
the effort in, this will save your butt one day!
What Is Data Scraping And How Can You Use It? | Target Internet
What Is Data Scraping? Data scraping, also known as web scraping, is the process of importing information from a website into a spreadsheet or local file saved on your computer. It’s one of the most efficient ways to get data from the web, and in some cases to channel that data to another website. Popular uses of data scraping include:Research for web content/business intelligencePricing for travel booker sites/price comparison sitesFinding sales leads/conducting market research by crawling public data sources (e. g. Yell and Twitter)Sending product data from an e-commerce site to another online vendor (e. Google Shopping)And that list’s just scratching the surface. Data scraping has a vast number of applications – it’s useful in just about any case where data needs to be moved from one place to basics of data scraping are relatively easy to master. Let’s go through how to set up a simple data scraping action using Scraping with dynamic web queries in Microsoft ExcelSetting up a dynamic web query in Microsoft Excel is an easy, versatile data scraping method that enables you to set up a data feed from an external website (or multiple websites) into a this excellent tutorial video to learn how to import data from the web to Excel – or, if you prefer, use the written instructions below:Open a new workbook in ExcelClick the cell you want to import data intoClick the ‘Data’ tabClick ‘Get external data’Click the ‘From web’ symbolNote the little yellow arrows that appear to the top-left of web page and alongside certain contentPaste the URL of the web page you want to import data from into the address bar (we recommend choosing a site where data is shown in tables)Click ‘Go’Click the yellow arrow next to the data you wish to importClick ‘Import’An ‘Import data’ dialogue box pops upClick ‘OK’ (or change the cell selection, if you like)If you’ve followed these steps, you should now be able to see the data from the website set out in your great thing about dynamic web queries is that they don’t just import data into your spreadsheet as a one-off operation – they feed it in, meaning the spreadsheet is regularly updated with the latest version of the data, as it appears on the source website. That’s why we call them configure how regularly your dynamic web query updates the data it imports, go to ‘Data’, then ‘Properties’, then select a frequency (“Refresh every X minutes”). Automated data scraping with toolsGetting to grips with using dynamic web queries in Excel is a useful way to gain an understanding of data scraping. However, if you intend to use data regularly scraping in your work, you may find a dedicated data scraping tool more are our thoughts on a few of the most popular data scraping tools on the market:Data Scraper (Chrome plugin)Data Scraper slots straight into your Chrome browser extensions, allowing you to choose from a range of ready-made data scraping “recipes” to extract data from whichever web page is loaded in your tool works especially well with popular data scraping sources like Twitter and Wikipedia, as the plugin includes a greater variety of recipe options for such tried Data Scraper out by mining a Twitter hashtag, “#jourorequest”, for PR opportunities, using one of the tool’s public recipes. Here’s a flavour of the data we got back:As you can see, the tool has provided a table with the username of every account which had posted recently on the hashtag, plus their tweet and its URLHaving this data in this format would be more useful to a PR rep than simply seeing the data in Twitter’s browser view for a number of reasons: It could be used to help create a database of press contactsYou could keep referring back to this list and easily find what you’re looking for, whereas Twitter continuously updatesThe list is sortable and editableIt gives you ownership of the data – which could be taken offline or changed at any momentWe’re impressed with Data Scraper, even though its public recipes are sometimes slightly rough-around-the-edges. Try installing the free version on Chrome, and have a play around with extracting data. Be sure to watch the intro movie they provide to get an idea of how the tool works and some simple ways to extract the data you want. WebHarvyWebHarvy is a point-and-click data scraper with a free trial version. Its biggest selling point is its flexibility – you can use the tool’s in-built web browser to navigate to the data you would like to import, and can then create your own mining specifications to extract exactly what you need from the source is a feature-rich data mining tool suite that does much of the hard work for you. Has some interesting features, including “What’s changed? ” reports that can notify you of updates to specified websites – ideal for in-depth competitor are marketers using data scraping? As you will have gathered by this point, data scraping can come in handy just about anywhere where information is used. Here are some key examples of how the technology is being used by marketers:Gathering disparate dataOne of the great advantages of data scraping, says Marcin Rosinski, CEO of FeedOptimise, is that it can help you gather different data into one place. “Crawling allows us to take unstructured, scattered data from multiple sources and collect it in one place and make it structured, ” says Marcin. “If you have multiple websites controlled by different entities, you can combine it all into one feed. “The spectrum of use cases for this is infinite. ”FeedOptimise offers a wide variety of data scraping and data feed services, which you can find out about at their website. Expediting researchThe simplest use for data scraping is retrieving data from a single source. If there’s a web page that contains lots of data that could be useful to you, the easiest way to get that information onto your computer in an orderly format will probably be data finding a list of useful contacts on Twitter, and import the data using data scraping. This will give you a taste of how the process can fit into your everyday work. Outputting an XML feed to third party sitesFeeding product data from your site to Google Shopping and other third party sellers is a key application of data scraping for e-commerce. It allows you to automate the potentially laborious process of updating your product details – which is crucial if your stock changes often. “Data scraping can output your XML feed for Google Shopping, ” says Target Internet’s Marketing Director, Ciaran Rogers. “ I have worked with a number of online retailers retailer who were continually adding new SKU’s to their site as products came into stock. If your E-commerce solution doesn’t output a suitable XML feed that you can hook up to your Google Merchant Centre so you can advertise your best products that can be an issue. Often your latest products are potentially the best sellers, so you want to get them advertised as soon as they go live. I’ve used data scraping to produce up-to-date listings to feed into Google Merchant Centre. It’s a great solution, and actually, there is so much you can do with the data once you have it. Using the feed, you can tag the best converting products on a daily basis so you can share that information with Google Adwords and ensure you bid more competitively on those products. Once you set it up its all quite automated. The flexibility a good feed you have control of in this way is great, and it can lead to some very definite improvements in those campaigns which clients love. ”It’s possible to set up a simple data feed into Google Merchant Centre for yourself. Here’s how it’s done:How to set up a data feed to Google Merchant CentreUsing one of the techniques or tools described previously, create a file that uses a dynamic website query to import the details of products listed on your site. This file should automatically update at regular details should be set out as specified this file to a password-protected URLGo to Google Merchant Centre and log in (make sure your Merchant Centre account is properly set up first)Go to ProductsClick the plus buttonEnter your target country and create a feed nameSelect the ‘scheduled fetch’ optionAdd the URL of your product data file, along with the username and password required to access itSelect the fetch frequency that best matches your product upload scheduleClick SaveYour product data should now be available in Google Merchant Centre. Just make sure you Click on the ‘Diagnostics’ tab to check it’s status and ensure it’s all working dark side of data scrapingThere are many positive uses for data scraping, but it does get abused by a small minority most prevalent misuse of data scraping is email harvesting – the scraping of data from websites, social media and directories to uncover people’s email addresses, which are then sold on to spammers or scammers. In some jurisdictions, using automated means like data scraping to harvest email addresses with commercial intent is illegal, and it is almost universally considered bad marketing web users have adopted techniques to help reduce the risk of email harvesters getting hold of their email address, including:Address munging: changing the format of your email address when posting it publicly, e. typing ‘patrick[at]’ instead of ‘’. This is an easy but slightly unreliable approach to protecting your email address on social media – some harvesters will search for various munged combinations as well as emails in a normal format, so it’s not entirely ntact forms: using a contact form instead of posting your email address(es) on your if your email address is presented in image form on your website, it will be beyond the technological reach of most people involved in email Data Scraping FutureWhether or not you intend to use data scraping in your work, it’s advisable to educate yourself on the subject, as it is likely to become even more important in the next few are now data scraping AI on the market that can use machine learning to keep on getting better at recognising inputs which only humans have traditionally been able to interpret – like improvements in data scraping from images and videos will have far-reaching consequences for digital marketers. As image scraping becomes more in-depth, we’ll be able to know far more about online images before we’ve seen them ourselves – and this, like text-based data scraping, will help us do lots of things there’s the biggest data scraper of all – Google. The whole experience of web search is going to be transformed when Google can accurately infer as much from an image as it can from a page of copy – and that goes double from a digital marketing you’re in any doubt over whether this can happen in the near future, try out Google’s image interpretation API, Cloud Vision, and let us know what you think. get your free membership now – absolutely no credit card requiredThe Digital Marketing ToolkitExclusive live video learning sessionsComplete library of The Digital Marketing PodcastThe digital skills benchmarking toolsFree online training courses FREE MEMBERSHIP
Scraping the Web with WebScraper.io | by Donovan Cotter | Medium
In this post I wanted to discuss and demonstrate how to get data from websites using is web scraping? It’s extracting data, such as product information from an e-commerce site, from use a web scraper? Some companies don’t provide data via APIs and yet this data could be useful to something you’re trying to develop. If you’re a business owner and are interested in getting information about competitors you could scrape their websites on a regular schedule to accomplish this. Going through a website to manually obtain lots of information (maybe using the copy/paste method) is an inefficient use of time. It can also be used for data science projects such as those involving machine learning where you may have trouble finding the data necessary for your was my first go at web scraping so naturally I started Googling web scrapers and quickly realized the overwhelming amount of options. I use a MacBook and many only supported Windows OS, although I’m not sure why this was the case. I came across, which is a free Chrome extension. This tool runs right in your Chrome browser, has detailed documentation and is fairly straight forward to use. After you build out how you want to navigate and scrape the website you can watch the scraping take place in a secondary browser. After it’s done scraping you can export the data to a CSV the demo below we will scrape the data from Macy’s website and export the data to a CSV file. We will concentrate on how to get product detail information from their Home category. So lets get 1: You’ll need to download the Chrome browser if you don’t already have it along with, which is a Chrome extension. After downloading the extension you should see a spider web icon on the right side of the browser toolbar. If it isn’t there then try to restart your 2: Select the hamburger menu at the far right side of your toolbar, select “More Tools” and then select “Developer Tools”. This will open up a developer tools window at the bottom of the 3: Select “Web Scraper” from the developer tools and then select “Create new sitemap” from the options. The sitemap is the blueprint for how you want the scraper to navigate the website and obtain the data you want. Give your sitemap a name along with the URL where you want the scraper to start. For our Macy’s example we will be starting at the home page. Also be sure to go to the page in the browser. Since this tool works in the browser we navigate through the site while setting up our 4: Adding the first selector. After setting up the initial starting point you’ll be able to add the first selector. A selector is essentially what you want the web scraper to do next. This is where we will tell the web scraper to navigate from the Macy’s home page to their Home category where we’ll look to get product detail data from their home goods section. Be sure that you’re inside of the root selector and select the add new selector 5: Setting up the Home link selector. We want the scraper to select the Home category from the Macy’s home page so we can then enter the home goods section of the website. The type of selector will be a link since selecting this button will link us to that section of the site. We give the selector an Id and select the type from the Type field. In our scenario this would be a Link type. Then we select the Select button and this brings up the Element preview, which is a toolbar that will obtain the information. (link and the href attribute of the link) of the element you are selecting on the page. If you select “Enable key events” on the toolbar you’ll see an “S”, “P”, and “C”. If you hold down S on your keyboard while hovering over the area you want to select it’ll get the information needed from that link. In our scenario we will hover over the Home category button, which gets the element’s info and places it in the Element preview. Then select the “Done selecting! ” button, which will take that element info and place it in the Selector field of your selector creation window. Then save the 6: Creating a selector for the subcategories of the Home category. This selector will allow the scraper to get the product detail from each subcategory as it iterates over each one. Similar to the last step this will be creating a link selector with the difference being this will be for multiple links. In our sitemap be sure to select the previous selector, “home_link”. We do this because it is a hierarchical setup in which we navigate the site so this new selector will be a child of the previous one. Once we’re inside of “home_link” we add a new selector. In the browser navigate to the the Home category and you should see on the left side of the page subcategories under “Home Categories”. Fill out the Id field (I call it home_categories_links) and the Type field as Link. Select “Multiple” underneath the Selector field and then enable key events in the Element preview. Then hold S on your keyboard and start selecting the links under Home Categories. After you select two of the links the scraper is smart enough to detect the pattern and select the rest of the links that have common element information for all links. This way when the scraper is navigating the site it’ll know it has to go through all of those subcategories and get product info. Be sure that the element’s info is in the Selector field and then save the 7: Select the product links under the subcategories. In order to get a product’s details we need the scraper to select the product from each subcategory. Once again similar to the last step lets make sure we are now inside of our previous selector “home_categories_links” and then add a new selector. In the browser select one of the subcategories so we are on that page. Give the selector a name (I called it “item_links”). We will be selecting multiple links again. So set up the selector the same way as the previous step. In this case you can either make the link to select the product’s title or the image since both link to the product detail page. I choose to select the image. Once you start to select multiple product images while holding down the S on your keyboard you’ll notice that similar to the previous step all of the image boxes will be selected and the common element info will be in the element preview toolbar. Be sure this info is in the Selector field and save that A quick recap of what the parent/child relationship of our sitemap graph would look like at this point:Step 8: Select the product detail information we want. Make sure you’re inside of the “home_categories_links” selector and create a new selector. In the browser select one of the products from the subcategory so that you‘re on that product’s detail page. We are going to get a product’s name, price, color and image, which will be a URL to the image. We will create four selectors for these, which will all be children of the “home_categories_links” selector. So add a new selector for the product name and give it an Id (I called it “item_name”). The selector type will be Text. Bring up the Element preview and select the text of the item’s name to obtain the element info then save this selector. The same steps will apply for the price, color and image selectors. For the image the only difference will be the selector’s type, which will be Image instead of 9: Verify your sitemap navigation. You can view your sitemap’s parent/child relationship by selecting the sitemap’s dropdown and then selecting “Selector Graph” 10: Scrape the data! To start scraping select “Scrape ”Under the sitemap’s dropdown. This will take you to a screen that allows you to adjust the request interval and page load delay times in milliseconds. The default is 2000 but I noticed these had to be increase to 3000 for Macy’s to allow the product detail page to fully load in time before trying to get the information from the page. Once you select “Start Scraping” a secondary browser will launch that allows you to observe the scraping in 11: Export as CSV. While the website scraping is in progress you have ability to refresh to show the data collected so far. After the scraping is finished you can then export the data into a CSV, which is located under the sitemap dropdown, and then you’re done! ConclusionWeb scraping can be a very useful tool. There are many options to choose from and I encourage you to research which tool or service to use based on your needs and budget. is flexible and there are many other types of selectors you can create and your sitemap can be setup to scrape a lot of different parts of the website all in one session. For other resources checkout out their website, video tutorials on YouTube, their documentation or ask a question or search for an answer on their forum.
Frequently Asked Questions about data scraper io
What does a data scraper do?
Data scraping, also known as web scraping, is the process of importing information from a website into a spreadsheet or local file saved on your computer. … It’s one of the most efficient ways to get data from the web, and in some cases to channel that data to another website.
Is WebScraper IO free?
I came across WebScraper.io, which is a free Chrome extension. This tool runs right in your Chrome browser, has detailed documentation and is fairly straight forward to use. After you build out how you want to navigate and scrape the website you can watch the scraping take place in a secondary browser.Apr 2, 2018
What is WebScraper io?
Webscraper.io is a free extension for the Google Chrome web browser with which users can extract information from any public website using HTML and CSS and export the data as a Comma Separated Value (CSV) file, which can be opened in spreadsheet processing software like Excel or Google Sheets.