Web Scraping should be the first step concerned about data analysis. It is aimed to turn unstructured data on the web into structured data that can stored to your local computer or a database. Since there are many social media websites posting millions of real-time micro-blogs containing various kinds of useful information in different topics, including politics, medical care, and etc. Thus, people can scrape the website for the resource of data and have it analyzed in many ways.
There are many ways to scrape data from target websites, using the public APIs provided by certain websites, like Twitter REST API, Facebook Graph API and etc; Or we can choose to build a crawler on our own by programming. Recently, to make scraping available to common people, many web scraping software tools are available now. The web scraping technique is implemented by web scraping software tools. These tools interacts with websites in the same way as you do when using a web browser like Chrome. In addition to display the data in a browser, web scrapers extract data from web pages and store them to a local folder or database. There are lots of web scraping software tools on the web. In this writing, I’d like to propose the top 8 web scraping tools for you to consider.
1. Octoparse
Octoparse is a free windows-based visual web scraping software. It can scrape most websites based on users’ needs. Users will not required to program or deal with complex configuration settings. Data scraped can be exported to your local folder or databases in various formats.
2. Common Crawl
Common Crawl provides open datasets of crawled websites. It contains raw web page data, extracted metadata and text extractions. Its dataset lives on Amazon S3 as part of the Amazon Public Datasets program.Users can download the files entirely free using HTTP or S3.
3. Content Grabber
Content Grabber is also a local-based web scraping software targeted at different levels of users. It allows you to create a stand-alone web scraping agents.
4. Dexi.io
Dexi.io is a professional cloud web scraping software for automated big data refinery. It offers both free and professional plans. It will be a great option for handling JavaScript.
5. Scrapeit
Scrape.it is a node.js web scraping software for humans. It’s a cloud-base web data extraction tool.
6. Scrapehub
Scrapehub provides a cloud-based web scraping platform that allows developers to deploy and scale their crawlers on demand. It will be a great option if you are a developer.
7. Unipath
UiPath is a robotic process automation software for free web scraping. It automates web and desktop data extraction out of most third-party Apps. You can install the robotic process automation software if you run a Windows system.
8. Import. io
Import.io is a free online web scraping software that allows you to scrape data from websites and organize it into data sets. It has a modern interface that makes it easier to use.
