Top 7 Web Mining Tools to Extract Data from Any Website

What Is Web Mining

Before we step into the tool of web data mining, let’s learn what web mining is first. Nowadays, people live in the generation of big data. Some people may be familiar with big data phrases, such as web mining, data mining, web scraping, and so on. If not, no worries, we have many sources to help you go through them. Now, let’s continue our topic: web mining. According to Wikipedia, “Web mining is the application of data mining techniques to discover patterns from the World Wide Web”. From the explanation, we learn that the main purpose of web mining is used to predict user behavior and discover useful information. It could really benefit the business if people can make good use of this technique.

There are 3 areas of web mining: web content mining, web usage mining, and web structure mining.

1. Web Content Mining

It is a process of collecting useful data from websites. This content includes news, comments, company information, product catalogs, etc.

2. Web Usage Mining

This is a process of identifying or discovering patterns from large data sets. And these patterns enable you to predict user behaviors or something like that. They are two types of techniques for patterns: pattern analysis tool and pattern discovery tool.

3. Web Structure Mining

Web structure mining also known as link mining. It is a process to discover the relationship between web pages linked by information or direct link connection.

Top 7 Web Mining Tools Around the Web

A web data miner is computer software that uses data mining techniques to identify or discover patterns from large data sets. Data is money in today’s world, but the information is huge, diverse, and redundant. Having the tools for mining is going to be a gateway to help you get the right information. In this post, you can learn the list of the most popular web mining tools around the web.

1. Octoparse

Octoparse is a simple but powerful web data mining tool that automates web data extraction. It allows you to create highly accurate extraction rules. (You know I will definitely mention our tool.) Crawlers run in Octoparse are determined by the configured rule. The extraction rule would tell Octoparse which website to go to, where the data is you plan to crawl, what kind of data you want, and much more.

You can extract data by using Octoparse web data miner within 3 easy steps. Or you can follow Octoparse detailed user guide.

Step 1: Copy and paste the target URL to Octoparse main panel after you have downloaded it on your devices.

Step 2: Extract data by the auto-detect mode and customize the workflow on the right panel. Or you can try the pre-set templates.

Step 3: Run the task after you have a preview. After a few minutes, you can download the data to Excel, CSV or other formats that are able for further use.

Supported Operating Systems: Windows XP/7/8/10

Area of Web Mining: Web Content Mining

2. R

R is a language or a free environment for statistical computing and graphics. It has been made accessible from scripting languages like Python, Ruby, Perl, etc.

Supported Operating Systems: UNIX platforms, Windows, MacOS

Area of Web Mining: Web Usage Mining

3. Oracle Data Mining (ODM)

Oracle Data Mining is a data mining software by Oracle. Oracle Data Mining is implemented in the Oracle Database kernel, and mining models are first-class database objects. Oracle Data Mining processes use built-in features of Oracle Database to maximize scalability and make efficient use of system resources.

Supported Operating Systems: Microsoft Windows

Area of Web Mining: Web Usage Mining

4. Tableau

Tableau offers a family of interactive data visualization products focused on business intelligence. Tableau allows instantaneous insight by transforming data into visually appealing, interactive visualizations called dashboards. This process takes only seconds or minutes rather than months or years and is achieved through the use of an easy-to-use, drag-and-drop interface.

Supported Operating Systems: Mac, Windows

Area of Web Mining: Web Usage Mining

5. Scrapy

Scrapy is an open-source framework for collecting data from websites. It is written in Python and you can write the rules to extract web data.

Supported Operating Systems: Linux, Windows, Mac and BSD

Area of Web Mining: Web Content Mining

6. HITS algorithm

HITS, short for Hyperlink-Induced Topic Search, also known as hubs and authorities, is a link analysis algorithm that rates Web pages. In the HITS algorithm, the first step is to retrieve the most relevant pages to the search query. This set is called the root set and can be obtained by taking the top pages returned by a text-based search algorithm. A base set is generated by augmenting the root set with all the web pages that are linked from it and some of the pages that link to it. The web pages in the base set and all hyperlinks among those pages form a focused subgraph.

Area of Web Mining: Web Structure Mining

7. PageR

PageRank Algorithm is the Popular Web structure Mining Algorithm. PageRank is a link analysis algorithm and it assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of "measuring" its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references.

Area of Web Mining: Web Structure Mining

Hope you can get some ideas about web mining after reading this article. Nowadays, many advanced technologies benefit our lives and we should make good use of them. Check out the related sources below if you want to learn about more other topics about big data. We will keep updated.

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