Wednesday, 31 December 2014

Data Scraping Services with Proxy Data Scraping

Have you ever heard of "data scraping? Data Scraping is the process of gathering relevant information in the public domain on the internet (private areas even if the conditions are met) and stored in databases or spreadsheets for later use in various applications. Scraping data technology is not new and a successful businessman his fortune by using data scraping technology.

Sometimes owners of sites that are not derived much pleasure from the automated harvesting of their data. Webmasters have learned to deny access to web scrapers their websites using tools or methods that some IP addresses to block the content of the site here. scrapers data is left to either target a different site, or the script to move the harvest of a computer using a different IP address each time and get as much information as possible to "all computers finally blocked the nozzle.

Fortunately, there is a modern solution to this problem. Proxy data scraping technology solves the problem by using a proxy IP addresses. When your data scraping program performs an extraction of a website, the site thinks that it comes from a different IP address. For site owner, proxies just like scratching a short period of increased traffic around the world. They have very limited resources and tedious to block such a scenario, but more importantly - for the most part, they simply do not know they are scraped.

Now you can ask. "Where can I proxy data scraping technology for my project" The "do-it-yourself solution is free, unfortunately, not easy at all Creation of a database scraping proxy network takes time and requires you to either a group of IP addresses and servers can be used in place yet, the computer guru you need to call to get everything configured. You may consider hiring proxy servers hosting providers to select, but this option is usually quite expensive, but probably better than the alternative: dangerous and unreliable servers (but free) public proxy.

There are literally thousands of free proxy servers located all over the world are fairly easy to use. The trick is to find them. Hundreds of sites, list servers, but by placing a functioning, open and supports standard protocols that you need to a lesson in perseverance, trial and error will be. However, if you manage to find a working public representatives, there are dangers inherent in their use. First, you do not know who owns the server or activities taking place elsewhere on the server. Send applications or sensitive data via an open proxy is a bad idea. It's easy enough for a proxy server to keep all information you send or send it back to you to catch. If you choose the method of replacing the public, make sure you never a transaction through which you or anyone else would jeopardize the case of unsavory types are made aware of the data to send.

A less risky scenario for data scraping proxy is to hire a proxy connection that runs through the rotation of a large number of private IP addresses. There are a number of these companies available that claim to remove all Web logs, which you harvest anonymously on the web with a minimal threat of retaliation. Companies such as enterprise solutions offer a large http://www.Anonymizer.com anonymous proxy, but often carry significant costs of installing enough for you to continue.

The other advantage is that companies that own such networks can often help design and implement a set of proxy data scraping custom program instead of trying to work with a generic bone scraping. After performing a simple Google search, I quickly found a company (www.ScrapeGoat.com) that an anonymous proxy server provides for data scraping purposes. Or, according to their website, if you want to make life even easier, scrap goat can retrieve data for you and a variety of different formats to deliver, often before you could finish up your plate from the scraping program.

Whatever path you choose for your data scraping proxy need not let a few simple tips to thwart access to all the wonderful information that is stored on the World Wide Web!

Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/small-business-articles/data-scraping-services-with-proxy-data-scraping-4697825.html

Monday, 29 December 2014

How to scrape address from Google Maps

If you want to build a new online directory based website and want it to be popular with latest web contents, then you need the help of web scraping services from iWeb scraping. If you want to scrape address from maps.google.com, there is a specialized web scraping tool developed by iWeb scraping which can do the job for you. There are plenty of benefits with web scraping which includes market research, gathering customer information, managing product catalogs, compare prices, gather real estate data, gather job posting information etc. Web scraping technology is very popular nowadays and it saves lot of time and effort involved in manual extraction of data from websites.

The web scraping tools developed iWeb Scraping is very user-friendly and can extract specific information from targeted websites. It converts data from HTML web pages to useful formats like Excel spread sheets or Access database. Whatever web scraping requirements you have, you can contact iWeb Scraping as they have more than 3.5 years of web data extraction experience and offer the best prices in the industry. Also their services are available in 24x7 basis and free pilot projects will be done based on request.

Companies which require specific web data and look for an application which can automate the process and export the HTML data in structured format could benefit greatly from web scraping applications of iWeb scraping. You can easily extract data from multiple target websites, parse and re-assemble the information in HTML format to database or spread sheets as you wish. The application has simple point-and-click user-interface and any beginner can use it scrape address from Google Maps. If you want to gather address of people in particular region from Google maps, you can do it with help of web scraping application developed by iWebscraping.

Web Scraping is a technology that able to digest target website databases that are visible only as HTML web pages, and create a local, identical replica of those databases as a information or result. With our web scraping & web data extraction service we can capture web pages, then pin-point specific pieces of data/information you'd like to extract from web pages. What is needed in this process is much more than a Website crawler and set of Website wrappers. The time required to do web data extraction goes down in comparison to manually data copying and pasting job.

Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/information-technology-articles/how-to-scrape-address-from-google-maps-4683906.html

Friday, 26 December 2014

So What Exactly Is A Private Data Scraping Services To Use You?

If your computer connects to the Internet or resources on the request for this information, and queries to different servers. If you have a website to introduce to the site server recognizes your computer's IP address and displays the data and much more. Many e - commerce sites use to log your IP address, and the browsing patterns for marketing purposes.

Related Articles

Follow Some Tips For Data Scraping Services

Web Data Scraping Assuring Scraping Success Proxy Data Services

Data Scraping Services with Proxy Data Scraping

Web Data Extraction Services for Data Collection - Screen Scrapping Services, Data Mining Services

The  Scraping server you connect to your destination or to process your information and make a filter. For example, IP address or protocol filtering traffic through a  Scraping service. As you might guess, there are many types of  Scraping services. including the ability to a high demand for the software. Email messages are quickly sent to businesses and companies to help you search for contacts.

Although there are Sanding free  Scraping IP addresses in this way can work, the use of payment services, and automatic user interface (plug and play) are easy to give.  Scraping web information services, thus offering a variety of relevant sources of data.  Scraping information service organizations are generally used where large amounts of data every day. It is possible for you to receive efficient, high precision is also affordable.

Information on the various strategies that companies,  Scraping excellent information services, and use the structure planned out and has led to the introduction of more rapid relief of the Earth.

In addition, the application software that has flexibility as a priority. In addition, there is a software that can be tailored to the needs of customers, and satisfy various customer requirements play a major role. Particular software, allows businesses to sell, a customer provides the features necessary to provide the best experience.

If you do not use a private Data Scraping Services suggest that you immediately start your Internet marketing. It is an inexpensive but vital to your marketing company. To choose how to set up a private  Scraping service, visit my blog for more information. Data Scraping Services software as the activity data and provides a large amount of information, Sorting. In this way, the company reduced the cost and time savings and greater return on investment will be a concept.

Without the steady stream of data from these sites to get stopped? Scraping HTML page requests sent by argument on the web server, depending on changes in production, it is very likely to break their staff. 

Data Scraping Services is common in the respective outsourcing company. Many companies outsource  Data Scraping Services service companies are increasingly outsourcing these services, and generally dealing with the Internet business-related activities, in particular a lot of money, can earn.

Web  Data Scraping Services, pull information from a structured plan format. Informal or semi-structured data source from the source.They are there to just work on your own server to extract data to execute. IP blocking is not a problem for them when they switch servers in minutes and back on track, scraping exercise. Try this service and you'll see what I mean.

It is an inexpensive but vital to your marketing company. To choose how to set up a private  Scraping service, visit my blog for more information. Data Scraping Services software as the activity data and provides a large amount of information, Sorting. In this way, the company reduced the cost and time savings and greater return on investment will be a concept.

Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/outsourcing-articles/so-what-exactly-is-a-private-data-scraping-services-to-use-you-5587140.html

Thursday, 25 December 2014

Limitations and Challenges in Effective Web Data Mining

Web data mining and data collection is critical process for many business and market research firms today. Conventional Web data mining techniques involve search engines like Google, Yahoo, AOL, etc and keyword, directory and topic-based searches. Since the Web's existing structure cannot provide high-quality, definite and intelligent information, systematic web data mining may help you get desired business intelligence and relevant data.

Factors that affect the effectiveness of keyword-based searches include:

• Use of general or broad keywords on search engines result in millions of web pages, many of which are totally irrelevant.

• Similar or multi-variant keyword semantics my return ambiguous results. For an instant word panther could be an animal, sports accessory or movie name.

• It is quite possible that you may miss many highly relevant web pages that do not directly include the searched keyword.

The most important factor that prohibits deep web access is the effectiveness of search engine crawlers. Modern search engine crawlers or bot can not access the entire web due to bandwidth limitations. There are thousands of internet databases that can offer high-quality, editor scanned and well-maintained information, but are not accessed by the crawlers.

Almost all search engines have limited options for keyword query combination. For example Google and Yahoo provide option like phrase match or exact match to limit search results. It demands for more efforts and time to get most relevant information. Since human behavior and choices change over time, a web page needs to be updated more frequently to reflect these trends. Also, there is limited space for multi-dimensional web data mining since existing information search rely heavily on keyword-based indices, not the real data.

Above mentioned limitations and challenges have resulted in a quest for efficiently and effectively discover and use Web resources. Send us any of your queries regarding Web Data mining processes to explore the topic in more detail.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Limitations-and-Challenges-in-Effective-Web-Data-Mining&id=5012994

Tuesday, 23 December 2014

Scraping table from html web with CloudStat

You need to use the data from internet, but don’t type, you can just extract or scrape them if you know the web URL.

Thanks to XML package from R. It provides amazing readHTMLtable() function.

For a study case,

I want to scrape data:

    US Airline Customer Score.
    World Top Chess Players (Men).

A. Scraping US Airline Customer Score table from

http://www.theacsi.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=147&catid=&Itemid=212&i=Airlines

Code:

airline = ‘http://www.theacsi.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=147&catid=&Itemid=212&i=Airlines’

airline.table = readHTMLTable(airline, header=T, which=1,stringsAsFactors=F)

Result:

B. Scraping World Top Chess players (Men) table from http://ratings.fide.com/top.phtml?list=men

Code:

chess = ‘http://ratings.fide.com/top.phtml?list=men’

chess.table = readHTMLTable(chess, header=T, which=5,stringsAsFactors=F)

Result:

Done. You had successfully scraping data from any web page with CloudStat.

You can get the full version of this study case (code and result) at Scraping table from html web.

Then, you can analyze as usual! Great! No more retype the data. Enjoy!

Source:http://www.r-bloggers.com/scraping-table-from-html-web-with-cloudstat/

Friday, 19 December 2014

Data Extraction - A Guideline to Use Scrapping Tools Effectively

So many people around the world do not have much knowledge about these scrapping tools. In their views, mining means extracting resources from the earth. In these internet technology days, the new mined resource is data. There are so many data mining software tools are available in the internet to extract specific data from the web. Every company in the world has been dealing with tons of data, managing and converting this data into a useful form is a real hectic work for them. If this right information is not available at the right time a company will lose valuable time to making strategic decisions on this accurate information.

This type of situation will break opportunities in the present competitive market. However, in these situations, the data extraction and data mining tools will help you to take the strategic decisions in right time to reach your goals in this competitive business. There are so many advantages with these tools that you can store customer information in a sequential manner, you can know the operations of your competitors, and also you can figure out your company performance. And it is a critical job to every company to have this information at fingertips when they need this information.

To survive in this competitive business world, this data extraction and data mining are critical in operations of the company. There is a powerful tool called Website scraper used in online digital mining. With this toll, you can filter the data in internet and retrieves the information for specific needs. This scrapping tool is used in various fields and types are numerous. Research, surveillance, and the harvesting of direct marketing leads is just a few ways the website scraper assists professionals in the workplace.

Screen scrapping tool is another tool which useful to extract the data from the web. This is much helpful when you work on the internet to mine data to your local hard disks. It provides a graphical interface allowing you to designate Universal Resource Locator, data elements to be extracted, and scripting logic to traverse pages and work with mined data. You can use this tool as periodical intervals. By using this tool, you can download the database in internet to you spread sheets. The important one in scrapping tools is Data mining software, it will extract the large amount of information from the web, and it will compare that date into a useful format. This tool is used in various sectors of business, especially, for those who are creating leads, budget establishing seeing the competitors charges and analysis the trends in online. With this tool, the information is gathered and immediately uses for your business needs.

Another best scrapping tool is e mailing scrapping tool, this tool crawls the public email addresses from various web sites. You can easily from a large mailing list with this tool. You can use these mailing lists to promote your product through online and proposals sending an offer for related business and many more to do. With this toll, you can find the targeted customers towards your product or potential business parents. This will allows you to expand your business in the online market.

There are so many well established and esteemed organizations are providing these features free of cost as the trial offer to customers. If you want permanent services, you need to pay nominal fees. You can download these services from their valuable web sites also.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Extraction---A-Guideline-to-Use-Scrapping-Tools-Effectively&id=3600918

Wednesday, 17 December 2014

Online Data Entry and Data Mining Services

Data entry job involves transcribing a particular type of data into some other form. It can be either online or offline. The input data may include printed documents like Application forms, survey forms, registration forms, handwritten documents etc.

Data entry process is an inevitable part of the job to any organization. One way or other each organization demands data entry. Data entry skills vary depends upon the nature of the job requirement, in some cases data to be entered from a hard copy formats and in some other cases data to be entered directly into a web portal. Online data entry job generally requires the data to be entered in to any online data base.

For a super market, data associate might be required to enter the goods which have sold in a particular day and the new goods received in a particular day to maintain the stock well in order. Also, by doing this the concerned authorities will get an idea about the sale particulars of each commodity as they requires. In another example, an office the account executive might be required to input the day to day expenses in to the online accounting database in order to keep the account well in order.

The aim of the data mining process is to collect the information from reliable online sources as per the requirement of the customer and convert it to a structured format for the further use. The major source of data mining is any of the internet search engine like Google, Yahoo, Bing, AOL, MSN etc. Many search engines such as Google and Bing provide customized results based on the user's activity history. Based on our keyword search, the search engine lists the details of the websites from where we can gather the details as per our requirement.

Collect the data from the online sources such as Company Name, Contact Person, Profile of the Company, Contact Phone Number of Email ID Etc. are doing for the marketing activities. Once the data is gathered from the online sources into a structured format, the marketing authorities will start their marketing promotions by calling or emailing the concerned persons, which may result to create a new customer. So basically data mining is playing a vital role in today's business expansions. By outsourcing the data entry and its related works, you can save the cost that would be incurred in setting up the necessary infrastructure and employee cost.

Source:http://ezinearticles.com/?Online-Data-Entry-and-Data-Mining-Services&id=7713395

Tuesday, 16 December 2014

RAM Scraping a New Old Favorite For Hackers

Some of the best stories involve a conflict with an old enemy: a friend-turned-foe, long thought dead, returning from the grave for violent retribution; an ancient order of dark siders from the distant reaches of the galaxy, hiding in plain sight and waiting to seize power for themselves; a dark lord thought destroyed millennia ago, only to rise again and seek his favorite piece of jewelry.  The list goes on.

Granted, 2011 isn’t quite “millennia,” and this story isn’t meant for entertainment, but the old foe in this instance is nonetheless dangerous in its own right.  That is the year when RAM scraping malware first made major headlines: originating as an advanced version of the Trackr malware, controlled through a botnet, it was discovered in the compromised Point of Sale (POS) systems of a university and several hotels.  And while it seemed recently that this method had dwindled in popularity, the Target and other retail breaches saw it return with a vengeance.  With 110 million Target customers having their information compromised, it was easily one the largest incidents involving memory scrapers.

How does it work?  First, the malware has to be introduced into the POS network, which can happen via any machine that is connected to the network, or unsecured wireless networks.  Even with firewalls, an infected laptop could serve as a vector.  Once installed, the malware can hide in the shadows, employing encryption or antivirus-avoiding tools to prevent its identification until it’s ready to strike.  Then, when a customer’s card gets used at a POS machine, the data contained within—name, card number, security code, etc.—gets sent to the system memory.  “There is that opportunity to steal the credit card information when it is in memory, perhaps even before your payment has even been authorized, and the data hasn't even been written to the hard drive yet,” says security researcher Graham Cluley.

So, why not encrypt the system’s memory, when it’s at its most vulnerable?  Not that simple, sadly: “No matter how strong your encryption is, if the system needs to process data or process the code, everything needs to be decrypted in memory,” Chris Elisan, principal malware scientist at security firm RSA, explained to Dark Reading.

There are certain steps a company can take, of course, and should take, to reduce the risk.  Strong passwords to access the POS machines, firewalls to isolate the POS network from the Internet, disabling remote access to POS systems, to name a few.  All the same, while these measures are vital and should be used, I don’t think, in light of recent breaches, they are sufficient.  Now, I wrote a short time ago about the impending October 2014 deadline imposed by the credit card industry, regarding the systematic switch to chipped credit card technology; adopting this standard will definitely assist in eradicating this problem.  But, until such a time when a widespread implementation of new systems comes about, always be vigilant to protect your data from attack, because what’s old is new again, and a colossal data breach is a story consumers are liable to seek financial restitution for.

Source:http://www.netlib.com/blog/application-security/RAM-Scraping-a-New-Old-Favorite-For-Hackers.asp

Sunday, 14 December 2014

Handling exceptions in scrapers

When requesting and parsing data from a source with unknown properties and random behavior (in other words, scraping), I expect all kinds of bizarrities to occur. Managing exceptions is particularly helpful in such cases.

Here is some ways that an exception might be raised.
[][0] #The list has no zeroth element, so this raises an IndexError
{}['foo'] #The dictionary has no foo element, so this raises a KeyError

Catching the exception is sometimes cleaner than preventing it from happening in the first place. Here are some examples handling bizarre exceptions in scrapers.

Example 1: Inconsistant date formats

Let’s say we’re parsing dates.
import datetime
This doesn’t raise an error.
datetime.datetime.strptime('2012-04-19', '%Y-%m-%d')
But this does.
datetime.datetime.strptime('April 19, 2012', '%Y-%m-%d')

It raises a ValueError because the date formats don’t match. So what do we do if we’re scraping a data source with multiple date formats?

Ignoring unexpected date formats

A simple thing is to ignore the date formats that we didn’t expect.

import lxml.html
import datetime
def parse_date1(source):
    rawdate = lxml.html.fromstring(source).get_element_by_id('date').text
    try:
         cleandate = datetime.datetime.strptime(rawdate, '%Y-%m-%d')
    except ValueError:
         cleandate = None
    return cleandate

print parse_date1('<div id="date">2012-04-19</div>')

If we make a clean date column in a database and put this in there, we’ll have some rows with dates and some rows with nulls. If there are only a few nulls, we might just parse those by hand.

Trying multiple date formats

Maybe we have determined that this particular data source uses three different date formats. We can try all three.

import lxml.html
import datetime

def parse_date2(source):

    rawdate = lxml.html.fromstring(source).get_element_by_id('date').text

    for date_format in ['%Y-%m-%d', '%B %d, %Y', '%d %B, %Y']:

        try:
             cleandate = datetime.datetime.strptime(rawdate, date_format)
             return cleandate
        except ValueError:
             pass
    return None

print parse_date2('<div id="date">19 April, 2012</div>')

This loops through three different date formats and returns the first one that doesn’t raise the error.

Example 2: Unreliable HTTP connection

If you’re scraping an unreliable website or you are behind an unreliable internet connection, you may sometimes get HTTPErrors or URLErrors for valid URLs. Trying again later might help.

import urllib2
def load(url):
    retries = 3
    for i in range(retries):
        try:
            handle = urllib2.urlopen(url)
            return handle.read()
        except urllib2.URLError:
            if i + 1 == retries:
                raise
            else:
                time.sleep(42)
    # never get here

print load('http://thomaslevine.com')

This function tries to download the page thee times. On the first two fails, it waits 42 seconds and tries again. On the third failure, it raises the error. On a success, it returs the content of the page.

Example 3: Logging errors rather than raising them

For more complicated parses, you might find loads of errors popping up in weird places, so you might want to go through all of the documents before deciding which to fix first or whether to do some of them manually.

import scraperwiki
for document_name in document_names:
    try:
        parse_document(document_name)
    except Exception as e:
        scraperwiki.sqlite.save([], {
            'documentName': document_name,
            'exceptionType': str(type(e)),
            'exceptionMessage': str(e)
        }, 'errors')

This catches any exception raised by a particular document, stores it in the database and then continues with the next document. Looking at the database afterwards, you might notice some trends in the errors that you can easily fix and some others where you might hard-code the correct parse.

Example 4: Exiting gracefully

When I’m scraping over 9000 pages and my script fails on page 8765, I like to be able to resume where I left off. I can often figure out where I left off based on the previous row that I saved to a database or file, but sometimes I can’t, particularly when I don’t have a unique index.


for bar in bars:
    try:
        foo(bar)
    except:
        print('Failure at bar = "%s"' % bar)
        raise

This will tell me which bar I left off on. It’s fancier if I save the information to the database, so here is how I might do that with ScraperWiki.

import scraperwiki
resume_index = scraperwiki.sqlite.get_var('resume_index', 0)
for i, bar in enumerate(bars[resume_index:]):
    try:
        foo(bar)
    except:
        scraperwiki.sqlite.save_var('resume_index', i)
        raise
scraperwiki.sqlite.save_var('resume_index', 0)

ScraperWiki has a limit on CPU time, so an error that often concerns me is the scraperwiki.CPUTimeExceededError. This error is raised after the script has used 80 seconds of CPU time; if you catch the exception, you have two CPU seconds to clean up. You might want to handle this error differently from other errors.

import scraperwiki
resume_index = scraperwiki.sqlite.get_var('resume_index', 0)
for i, bar in enumerate(bars[resume_index:]):
    try:
        foo(bar)
    except scraperwiki.CPUTimeExceededError:
        scraperwiki.sqlite.save_var('resume_index', i)
    except Exception as e:
        scraperwiki.sqlite.save_var('resume_index', i)
        scraperwiki.sqlite.save([], {
            'bar': bar,
            'exceptionType': str(type(e)),
            'exceptionMessage': str(e)
        }, 'errors')
scraperwiki.sqlite.save_var('resume_index', 0)

tl;dr

Expect exceptions to occur when you are scraping a randomly unreliable website with randomly inconsistent content, and consider handling them in ways that allow the script to keep running when one document of interest is bizarrely formatted or not available.

Source: https://blog.scraperwiki.com/2012/05/handling-exceptions-in-scrapers

Friday, 12 December 2014

Scraping Webmaster Tools with FMiner

The biggest problem (after the problem with their data quality) I am having with Google Webmaster Tools is that you can’t export all the data for external analysis. Luckily the guys from the FMiner.com web scraping tool contacted me a few weeks ago to test their tool. The problem with Webmaster Tools is that you can’t use web based scrapers and all the other screen scraping software tools were not that good in the steps you need to take to get to the data within Webmaster Tools. The software is available for Windows and Mac OSX users.

FMiner is a classical screen scraping app, installed on your desktop. Since you need to emulate real browser behaviour, you need to install it on your desktop. There is no coding required and their interface is visual based which makes it possible to start scraping within minutes. Another possibility I like is to upload a set of keywords, to scrape internal search engine result pages for example, something that is missing in a lot of other tools. If you need to scrape a lot of accounts, this tool provides multi-browser crawling which decreases the time needed.

This tool can be used for a lot of scraping jobs, including Google SERPs, Facebook Graph search, downloading files & images and collecting e-mail addresses. And for the real heavy scrapers, they also have built in a captcha solving API system so if you want to pass captchas while scraping, no problem.

Below you can find an introduction to the tool, with one of their tutorial video’s about scraping IMDB.com:

More basic and advanced tutorials can be found on their website: Fminer tutorials. Their tutorials show you a range of simple and complex tasks and how to use their software to get the data you need.

Guide for Scraping Webmaster Tools data


The software is capable of dealing with JavaScript and AJAX, one of the main requirements to scrape data from within Google Webmaster Tools.

Step 1: The first challenge is to login into webmaster tools. After opening a new project, first browse to https://www.google.com/webmasters/ and select the Recording button in the upper left corner.

fminer01

After browsing to this page, a goto action appears in the left panel. Click on this button and look for the “Action Options” button at the bottom of that panel. Tick the option Clear cookies before do it to avoid problems if you are already logged in for example.

fminer06

Step 2: Click the “Sign in Webmaster Tools” button. You will notice the Macro designer overview on the left registered a click as the first step.

fminer03

Step 3: Fill in your Google username and password. In the designer panel you will see the two Fill actions emerging.

fminer04

Step 4: After this step you should add some waiting time to be sure everything is fully loaded. Use the second button on the right side above the Macro Designer panel to add an action. 2000 milliseconds (2 seconds :)) will do the job.

fminer07

fminer08

Step 5: Browse to the account of which you want to export the data from

fminer05

Step 6: Browse to the specific pages of which you want the data scraped

fminer09

Step 7:Scrape the data from the tables as shown in the video

Congratulations, now you are able to scrape data from Google Webmaster Tools :)

Step 8: One of the things I use it for is pulling the search query data per keyword, which you normally can’t export. To do that, you have to use a right mouse click on the keyword, which opens a menu with options. Go to open links recursively and select normal. This will loop through all the keywords.

fminer10

Step 9: This video will show you how to make use of the pagination elements to loop through all the pages:

You can also download the following file, which has a predefined set of actions to login in WMT and download the keywords, impressions and clicks: google_webmaster_tools_login.fmpx. Open the file and update the login details by clicking on those action buttons and insert your own Google account details.

Automating and scheduling scrapers

For people that want to automate and regularly download the data, you can setup a Scheduler config and within the project settings you can setup the program to send an e-mail after completion of the crawl:

Source: http://www.notprovided.eu/scraping-webmaster-tools-fminer/

Tuesday, 9 December 2014

Scraping and Analyzing Angel List Syndicates: Kimono Labs + Silk

Because we use Silk to tell stories and visualize data, we are always looking for interesting ways to pull data into a Silk. Right now that means getting data into the CSV format. Fortunately, a wave of new and powerful visual webscraping tools and services have emerged. These make it very simple for anyone (no technical skills required) to scrape data from a website and export that data into a CSV which we can quickly upload into a Silk.

Cool New Scraping Tools

One of the tools we love in this new space is Kimono Labs. Backed by Y Combinator, Kimono combines a visual scraping editor with the ability to do very granular code-inspector level editing to scraping paths. Saved scrapes can be turned into APIs and exported as JSON. Kimono also lets you save time-series versioning of scrapes.

Data from angel-list-syndicates.silk.co

Like many startups, we watch the goings on at AngelList very closely. Syndicates are of particular interest. Basically, these are DIY venture capital pools that allow a qualified investor to serve as a syndicate leader and aggregate small investments from other qualified investors who are members of AngelList. The idea of the syndicates is to democratize the VC process and make it easier and less risky for individuals to participate.

We used Kimono to scrape information on the Top 25 Syndicates ranked by dollars backing each round. Kimono makes it very easy to visually designate which parts of a page to scrape and how many rows there are on a page. (Here you can see me highlighting the minimum dollar investment). We downloaded the information as a CSV and did a quick scrub to get it ready for upload to Silk. The process took no more than 15 minutes.

We could tell by eyeballing the numbers beforehand that a serious Power Law was in effect. And the actual data analysis on Silk bore this out. We chose to use a pie chart to show distribution. Three syndicates control nearly two-thirds of all the committed capital by Angel.co members in the syndicate program. One of the top three - Tim Ferriss - has no background as a venture capitalist or building technology companies but is rapidly becoming a force in startup investing. The person with the largest committed syndicate pool, Gil Penachina, is someone who is a quiet mover and shaker in Silicon Valley but he clearly packs a huge punch.

The largest syndicate in terms of likely commitments of deals per year is Foundry Group Angels, a group led by Brad Feld (@bfeld). While they put in less per deal, they are planning to back over 50 deals per year - a huge number. Trailing far behind those three was media impresario and Launch conference mogul Jason Calacanis, who is one of the most visible people in the startup space.

Source: http://blog.silk.co/post/83501793279/scraping-and-analyzing-angel-list-syndicates

Monday, 1 December 2014

Why scraping and why TheWebMiner?

If you read this blog you are one of two things: you are either interested in web scraping and you have studied this domain for quite a while, or you are just curious about this relatively new field of interest and want to know what it is, how it’s done and especially why. Either way it’s fine!

In case you haven’t googled already this I can tell you that data extraction (or scraping) is a technique in which a computer program extracts data from human-readable output coming from another program (wikipedia). Basically it can collect all the information on a certain subject from certain places. It’s sort of the equivalent of ctrl+f, at the scale of the whole internet. It’s nothing like the search engines that we currently use because it can extract the data in a certain file, as excel, csv (coma separated values) or any other that the buyer wants, and also extracts only the relevant data, only the values that you are interested in.

I hope now that you understand the concept and you are wondering just why would you need such data. Well let’s take the example of an online store, pretty common nowadays, and of course the manager just like any manager wants his business to thrive, so, for that he has to keep up with the other online stores. Now the web scraping takes place: it is very useful for him to have, saved as excels all the competitor’s prices of certain products if not all of them. By this he can maintain a fair pricing policy and always be ahead of his competitors by knowing all of their prices and fluctuations.  Of course the data collecting can also be done manually but this is not effective because we are talking of thousand of products each one having its own page and so on. This is only one example of situation in which scrapping is useful but there are hundreds and each one of them it’s profitable for the company.

By now I’ve talked about what it is and why you should be interested in it, from now on I’m going to explain why you should use thewebminer.com. First of all, it’s easy: you only have to specify what type of data you want and from where and we’ll manage the rest. Throughout the project you will receive first of all an approximation of price, followed by a time approximation. All the time you will be in contact with us so you can find out at any point what is the state of your project. The pricing policy is reasonable and depends on factors like the project size or complexity. For very big projects a discount may be applicable so the total cost be within reason.

Now I believe that thewebminer.com is able to manage with any kind of situation or requirement from users all over the world and to convince you, free samples are available at any project you may have or any uncertainty or doubt.

Source:http://thewebminer.com/blog/2013/07/