Scraping the Web with Scrapinghub For Startups 

“Getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant.” – Mitchell Kapor 

Who Uses Web Scraping It is used by everyone from individuals to multinational companies: ● Monitor your competitors’ prices by scraping product information ● Detect fraudulent reviews and sentiment changes by scraping product reviews ● Track online reputation by scraping social media profiles ● Create apps that use public data ● Track SEO by scraping search engine results 

Web Scraping Traffic 

Scrapinghub Our products empower our users to scrape data quickly and effectively using open source technologies. We offer: ● A cloud-based platform to help you scale your crawlers ● A smart proxy rotator to crawl the web even faster ● Professional Services to handle web scraping and data mining for you ● Off-the-shelf datasets so you can get data hassle-free 

Scrapy Scrapy is a web scraping framework that gets the dirty work related to web crawling out of your way. Benefits ● No platform lock-in: Open Source ● Very popular (13k+ ★) ● Battle tested ● Highly extensible ● Great documentation 

Portia Portia is a Visual Scraping tool that lets you get data without needing to write code. Benefits ● No platform lock-in: Open Source ● JavaScript dynamic content generation ● Ideal for non-developers ● Extensible ● It’s as easy as annotating a page 

Portia 

Large Scale Infrastructure Meet Scrapy Cloud , our PaaS for web crawlers: ● Scalable: Crawlers run on EC2 instances or dedicated servers ● Crawlera add-on ● Control your spiders: Command line, API or web UI ● Machine learning integration: BigML, MonkeyLearn, among others ● No lock-in: scrapyd to run Scrapy spiders on your own infrastructure 

Broad Crawls Frontera allows us to build large scale web crawlers in Python: ● Scrapy support out of the box ● Distribute and scale custom web crawlers across servers ● Crawl Frontier Framework: large scale URL prioritization logic ● Aduana to prioritize URLs based on link analysis (PageRank, HITS) 

Web Scraping Pitfalls 

Bot Countermeasures Websites are using increasingly sophisticated techniques to protect against bad bots. Unfortunately, these same technologies often prevent harmless bots from scraping content. Common countermeasures include: ● IP address-based bans ● JavaScript and session based counter-measures 

Blocked Crawlers Servers identify and block crawlers that continuously fire many requests to a website. Solution: Meet Crawlera , our smart proxy rotator for web crawlers. ● Routes requests through a pool of 50k+ IPs ● Detects, logs and handles bans ● Polite scraping: Automatically throttles requests to websites 

JavaScript in Web Pages Dynamic content generated by JavaScript is often used by websites to render the page (SPA) or to avoid being scraped by naive crawlers. For simple instances, you can emulate the AJAX requests in Scrapy. For complex cases, you can use Splash ● Works through an HTTP API ● Lua Scripts simulate user interaction ● No lock-in, it’s an open source project! 

Duplicate Content The web is full of duplicate content. Duplicate Content negatively impacts: ● Storage ● Re-crawl performance ● Quality of data Efficient algorithms for Near Duplicate Detection, like SimHash, are applied to estimate similarity between web pages to avoid scraping duplicated content. 

Near Duplicate Detection Uses Compare prices of products scraped from different retailers by finding near duplicates in a dataset: Merge similar items to avoid duplicate entries: Title Store Price ThinkPad X220 Laptop Lenovo (i7 2.8GHz, 12.5 LED, 320 GB) Acme Store 599.89 Lenovo Thinkpad Notebook Model X220 (i7 2.8, 12.5’’, HDD 320) XYZ Electronics 559.95 Name Summary Location Saint Fin Barre’s Cathedral Begun in 1863, the cathedral was the first major work of the Victorian architect William Burges… 51.8944, -8.48064 St. Finbarr’s Cathedral Cork Designed by William Burges and consecrated in 1870, ... 51.894401550293, -8.48064041137695 

Examples of Web Scraping Usage 

Competitor Monitoring E-commerce companies use web scraping to monitor the price fluctuations and the ratings of competitors: ● Scrape online retailers ● Structure the data in a search engine or DB ● Create an interface to search for products ● Sentiment analysis for product rankings 

We help electronics companies monitor the activities of their resellers: ● Tracking and watching out for stolen goods ● Pricing agreement violations ● Customer support responses on complaints ● Product line quality checks Monitor Resellers 

Lead Generation Mine scraped data to identify who to target in a company for your outbound sales campaigns: ● Locate possible leads in your target market ● Identify the right contacts within each one ● Augment the information you already have on them ● Use data science to guess their email address 

Reduce the time spent on HR tasks by creating a select pool of applicants: ● Mine scraped data to locate candidates ● Match requisite skills and background ● Spot and rescue employees that are shopping for a new job Human Resources 

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