Parsehub Web Scraping Software

 



Our Beginner's Guide to Web Scraping

The internet has become such a powerful tool because there is so much information on there. Many marketers, web developers, investors and data scientists use web scraping to collect online data to help them make valuable decisions.

  1. What is ParseHub? ParseHub is a data extraction solution designed to help software developers, data scientists, data journalists, business analysts, start-ups, pricing analysts, consultants, and marketing professionals capture data from JavaScript and AJAX pages.
  2. ParseHub is a free, easy-to-use web scraping tool. Once it is downloaded as an application onto a desktop, data can be extracted from websites for analysis. One of the many great things about.

But if you’re not sure how to use a web scraper tool, it can be intermediating and discouraging. The goal of this beginner's guide is to help introduce web scraping to people who are new to it or for those who don't know where to exactly start.

We’ll even go through an example together to give a basic understanding of it. So I recommended downloading our free web scraping tool so you can follow along.

The web scraper constantly scans the web and finds updates from multiple sources to get you real-time publications. Its admin console lets you control crawls and full-text search allows making complex queries on raw data. Content Grabber Content Grabber is a web crawling software targeted at enterprises. & they provide free and powerful web scraping tool. I have provided links in description below to download free version of web scraping tool from Parse Hub & Scrape Storm. They also have Paid version of web scraping tool, which works more effective than free version. First check ParseHub. ParseHub is a free and powerful web scraping tool.

So, let’s get into it.

Introduction to Web scraping

First, it's important to discuss what is web scraping and what you can do with it. Whether this is your first time hearing about web scraping, or you have but have no idea what it is, this beginner's guide will help guide you to discover what Web scraping is capable of doing!

What is Web Scraping?

Web scraping or also known as web harvesting is a powerful tool that can help you collect data online and transfer the information in either an excel, CSV or JSON file to help you better understand the information you’ve gathered.

Although web scraping can be done manually, this can be a long and tedious process. That’s why using data extraction tools are preferred when scraping online data as they can be more accurate and more efficient.

Web scraping is incredibly common and can be used to create APIs out of almost any website.

How do web scrapers work?


Automatic web scraping can be simple but also complex at the same time. But once you understand and get the hang of it, it’ll become a lot easier to understand. Just like anything in life, you need practice to make it perfect. At first, you’re not going to understand it but the more you do it, the more you’ll get the hang of it.

The web scraper will be given one or more URLs to load before scraping. The scraper then loads the entire HTML code for the page in question. More advanced scrapers will render the entire website, including CSS and JavaScript elements.

Then the scraper will either extract all the data on the page or specific data selected by the user before the project is run.

Ideally, you want to go through the process of selecting which data you want to collect from the page. This can be texts, images, prices, ratings, ASIN, addresses, URLs etc.

Once you have everything you want to extract selected, you can then place it on an excel/CSV file for you to analyze all of the data. Some advanced web scrapers can convert the data into a JSON file which can be used as an API.

If you want to learn more, you can read our guide on What is Web Scraping and what it’s used for

Is Web Scraping Legal?

With you being able to attract public information off of competitors or other websites, is web scraping legal?

Any publicly available data that can be accessed by everyone on the internet can be legally extracted.

The data has to follow these 3 criteria for it to be legally extracted:

  • User has made the data public
  • No account required for access
  • Not blocked by robots.txt file

As long as it follows these 3 rules, it's legal!

You can learn more about the rules of web scraping here: Is web scraping legal?

Web scraping for beginners

Now that we understand what web scraping is and how it works. Let’s use it in action to get the hang of it!

For this example, we are going to extract all of the blog posts ParseHub has created, how long they take to read, who wrote them and URLs. Not sure what you will use with this information, but we just want to show you what you can do with web scraping and how easy it can be!

First, download our free web scraping tool.

You’ll need to set up ParseHub on your desktop so here’s the guide to help you: Downloading and getting started.

Once ParesHub is ready, we can now begin scraping data.

Parsehub web scraping software for mac

If it’s your first time using ParseHub, we recommend following the tutorial just to give you an idea of how it works.

But let’s scrape an actual website like our Blog.

For this example, we want to extract all of the blogs we have written, the URL of the blog, who wrote the blog, and how long it takes to read.

Your first web scraping project

1. Open up ParseHub and create a new project by selecting “New Project”

2. Copy this URL: https://www.parsehub.com/blog/ and place it in the text box on the left-hand side and then click on the “Start project on this URL” button.

3. Once the page is loaded on ParseHub there will be 3 sections:

  • Command Section
  • The wbe page you're extracting from
  • Preview of what the data will look like

The command section is where you will tell the software what you want to do, whether this is a click making a selection, or the advanced features ParseHub can do.

4. To begin extracting data, you will need to click on what exactly you want to extract, in this case, the blog title. Click on the first blog title you see.

Open source web scraping software

Once clicked, the selection you made will turn green. ParseHub will then make suggestions of what it thinks you want to extract.

The suggested data will be in a yellow container. Click on a title that is in a yellow container then all blog titles will be selected. Scroll down a bit to make sure there is no blog title missing.

Scraping

Now that you have some data, you can see a preview of what it will look like when it's exported.

5. Let’s rename our selection to something that will help us keep our data organized. To do this, just double click on the selection, the name will be highlighted and you can now rename it. In this case, we are going to name it “blog_name”.

Software

Quick note, whenever renaming your selections or data to have no spaces i.e. Blog names won't work but blog_names will.

Now that all blog titles are selected, we also want to extract who wrote them, and how long they take to read. We will need to make a relative selection.

Open Source Web Scraping Software

6. On the left sidebar, click the PLUS (+) sign next to the blog name selection and choose the Relative Select command.

7. Using the Relative Select command, click on the first blog name and then the author. You will see an arrow connect the two selections. You should see something like this:

Let’s rename the relative selection to blog_author

Parsehub Web Scraping Software Reviews

Since we don’t need the image URL let’s get rid of it. To do this you want to click on the expand button on the “relative blog_author” selection.

Now select the trash can beside “extract blog_author”

8. Repeat steps 6 and 7 to get the length of the blog, you won't need to delete the URL since we are extracting a text. Let's name this selection “blog_length”

It should look like this.

Since our blog is a scrolling page (scroll to load more) we will need to tell the software to scroll to get all the content.

If you were to run the project now you would only get the first few blogs extracted.

9. To do this, click on the PLUS + sign beside the page selection and click select. You will need to select the main element to this, in this case, it will look like this.

10. Once you have the main Div clicked you can add the scroll function, to do this On the left sidebar, click the PLUS (+) sign next to the main selection, click on advanced, then select the scroll function.

You will need to tell how long the software to scroll, depending on how big the blog is you may need a bigger number. But for now, let’s put it 5 times and make sure it's aligned to the bottom.

If you still need help with the scroll option you can click here to learn more.

We will need to move the main scroll option above blog names, it should look like this now:

11. Now that we have everything we want to be extracted; we can now let ParseHub do its magic. Click on the “Get data” button

12. You’ll be taken to this page.

You can test your extraction to make sure it’s working properly. For bigger projects, we recommend doing a test run first. But for this project let's press “run” so ParseHub can extract the online data.

13. This project shouldn’t take too long, but once ParseHub is done extracting the data, you can now download it and export it into a CSV/Excel, JSON, or API. But we just need a CSV/ Excel file for this project.

And there you have it! You’ve completed your first web scraping project. Pretty simple huh? But ParseHub can do so much more!

Parsehub Web Scraping Software

What else can you do with web scraping?

Now that we scraped our blog and movie titles (if you did the tutorial), you can try to implement web scraping in more of a business-related setting. Our mission is to help you make better decisions and to make better decisions you need data.

ParseHub can help you make valuable decisions by doing efficient competitor research, brand monitoring and management, lead generation, finding investment opportunities and many more!

Parsehub Web Scraping Software Download

Whatever you choose to do with web scraping, ParseHub can Help!

Check out our other blog posts on how you can use ParseHub to help grow your business. We’ve split our blog posts into different categories depending on what kind of information you're trying to extract and the purpose of your scraping.

Ecommerce website/ Competitor Analysis / Brand reputation

Lead Generation

Brand Monitoring and Investing Opportunities

Closing Thoughts

Parsehub Web Scraping Software

There are many ways web scraping can help with your business and every day many businesses are finding creative ways to use ParseHub to grow their business! Web scraping is a great way to collect the data you need, but can be a bit intimidating at first if you don’t know what you’re doing. That’s why we wanted to create this beginner's guide to web scraping to help you gain a better understanding of what it is, how it works, and how you can use web scraping for your business!

If you have any trouble with anything, you can visit our help center or blog to help you to navigate with ParseHub or can contact support for any inquiries.

Learn more about web scraping

Parsehub Web Scraping Software Download

If you want to learn more about web scraping and elevate your skills, you can check out our free web scraping course! Once completed, you'll get a certification to show off your new skills and knowledge.

Web Scraping Software Mac

Happy Scraping!