Nowadays, people no longer worry about the lack of information, but they worry about paying for the screening of a large amount of useful information.
So how to collect useful information? There are RSS, blogs, and other information sources, but they do not fully meet our needs because a lot of information is not provided in the form of formatted data. To tackle this issue, engineers came up with a method to search for information exactly. Therefore, a large number of vertical search sites have appeared. We do not know in detail how it is implemented, but now we can precisely collect data.
What is web harvesting
Web harvesting, also known as web scraping, is the process of data collection from target web pages on the Internet by specialized programs or software. Data is further exported to the database of your choice. Web Harvesting still mainly focus on web content pages that are based on HTML / XML. You may need to grasp some technical terms like XQuery and RegEx (Regular Expression) that can help you screen the content of text / XML documents and thus to collect the exact information.
Octoparse, a web harvesting tool
Octoparse is an easy-to-use and powerful software for web harvesting. Unlike search engines that are to crawl the entire Internet, Octoparse is a typical web harvesting tool to harvest information from your target web pages by configuring simple rules.
Octoparse enables you to collect data from the web page, including the hidden data that is not displayed on the screen. It will go over all the web pages according to your needs.