Use the right web scraper software and save precious time and effort

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Use the Right Web Scraper Software and Save Precious Time and Effort The Web is a mine of information. Students, researchers, business organizations and individuals find information of their choice on different websites. The only problem a person faces is that he has to navigate hundreds of links in order to compile all the data he needs. The manual method is to visit each web page, copy the required material and paste it either into a worksheet, notepad or Word document. This is not only time consuming but it also requires a great deal of effort because one website may have hundreds of pages. Those with some knowledge of UNIX or HTTP programming can use their skills to extract data from websites by posting specific requests. Then you have web browsers such as Chrome and Firefox that may have add-ons and extensions that allow you to download web pages or even the entire contents of a website. The problems common users come up against are that some web pages are protected against copying and intrusions.

In these circumstances the best recourse is to go in for web scraping. Web scraping is an automatic method to collect information using web technologies with varying degrees of automation. Anyone wishing to download a whole lot of information is better off with web scraper software. There are paid versions as well as open source web scrapers. As is to be expected free versions are limited in functionality and features. It is best to buy full featured software from expert developers specializing in this technology. This utility should be fully customizable to let you set parameters on the data you wish to extract and then, with a click of the button, the extraction process starts. Users simply


launch the application and specify their choice of web scraping patterns and let the software do the rest. A package that offers the widest range of options is the one to select so that unnecessary data is not downloaded and you save on bandwidth usage, costs and time you spend in downloading as well as editing data.

A few of these packages are not able to access all types of websites. Users need to be aware that full featured software must be able to access any type of website and extract any type of data and then export it into the format of their choice, be it .txt, HTML, SQL script, csv or any other popular format that makes it easier to analyze such data in the quickest possible way. Not everyone is a computer wizard and for those unfamiliar with the technology, the software they select must be simple. All users need to do is enter the basic URL and let the package do the rest or specify a few more rules before clicking “go�. Just as all computer users are not equal, all scraping software also are not equal. Some will do it sequentially, which means it will take a long time to access all pages and download data one by one. Better and more efficient web scraper software will run multi-threaded sessions, accessing and downloading 20 pages simultaneously. Anyone doing serious work in which the Web figures prominently must have a suitable extractor and thus improve productivity and efficiency.

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