Assuring Scraping Success with Proxy Data Scraping

Assuring Scraping Success with Proxy Data Scraping


Have you ever heard of "Data Scraping?" Data Scraping is the process of collecting useful data that has been placed in

the public domain of the internet (private areas too if conditions are met) and storing it in databases or spreadsheets

for later use in various applications. Data Scraping technology is not new and many a successful businessman has

made his fortune by taking advantage of data scraping technology.

Sometimes website owners may not derive much pleasure from automated harvesting of their data. Webmasters

have learned to disallow web scrapers access to their websites by using tools or methods that block certain ip

addresses from retrieving website content. Data scrapers are left with the choice to either target a different website,

or to move the harvesting script from computer to computer using a different IP address each time and extract as

much data as possible until all of the scraper's computers are eventually blocked.

Thankfully there is a modern solution to this problem. Proxy Data Scraping technology solves the problem by using

proxy IP addresses. Every time your data scraping program executes an extraction from a website, the website thinks

it is coming from a different IP address. To the website owner, proxy data scraping simply looks like a short period of

increased traffic from all around the world. They have very limited and tedious ways of blocking such a script but

more importantly -- most of the time, they simply won't know they are being scraped.

You may now be asking yourself, "Where can I get Proxy Data Scraping Technology for my project?" The "do-it-

yourself" solution is, rather unfortunately, not simple at all. Setting up a proxy data scraping network takes a lot of

time and requires that you either own a bunch of IP addresses and suitable servers to be used as proxies, not to

mention the IT guru you need to get everything configured properly. You could consider renting proxy servers from

select hosting providers, but that option tends to be quite pricey but arguably better than the alternative: dangerous

and unreliable (but free) public proxy servers.

There are literally thousands of free proxy servers located around the globe that are simple enough to use. The trick

however is finding them. Many sites list hundreds of servers, but locating one that is working, open, and supports the

type of protocols you need can be a lesson in persistence, trial, and error. However if you do succeed in discovering a

pool of working public proxies, there are still inherent dangers of using them. First off, you don't know who the server

belongs to or what activities are going on elsewhere on the server. Sending sensitive requests or data through a public

proxy is a bad idea. It is fairly easy for a proxy server to capture any information you send through it or that it sends

back to you. If you choose the public proxy method, make sure you never send any transaction through that might

compromise you or anyone else in case disreputable people are made aware of the data.

A less risky scenario for proxy data scraping is to rent a rotating proxy connection that cycles through a large number

of private IP addresses. There are several of these companies available that claim to delete all web traffic logs which

allows you to anonymously harvest the web with minimal threat of reprisal. Companies such as offer large scale

anonymous proxy solutions, but often carry a fairly hefty setup fee to get you going.

Source:http://ezinearticles.com/?Assuring-Scraping-Success-with-Proxy-Data-Scraping&id=248993

Tapping The Mining Services Goldmine

Tapping The Mining Services Goldmine

In Australia, resources booms tend to come and go. In a recent speech, Reserve Bank Deputy Governor Ric Battellino identified five major booms over the last two hundred years - from the gold rush of the 1850s, to our current minerals and energy boom.

Many have argued that the current boom is different from anything we've experienced before, with the modernisation of the Chinese and Indian economies likely to keep demand high for decades. That's led some analysts to talk of a resources supercycle. And yet a supercycle is still a cycle.

By definition, cycles are uneven, with commodity prices ebbing and flowing in response to demand, economic conditions and market sentiment. And the share prices of resources companies tend to move with them.

Which raises the question: what's the best way for investors to tap into the potential of the mining boom, without the heart-stopping volatility that mining stocks sometimes deliver?
Invest in the store that sells the spade

Legend has it that the people who really profited from Australia's gold rush weren't the miners who flocked to the fields, but the store-owners who sold them their spades and pans. You can put the same principle to work today by investing in mining services and engineering companies.

Here are five reasons to consider giving mining services companies a place in your portfolio:

1. Growing demand

In November, the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics reported that mining and energy companies plan to invest a record $132.9bn in new projects, a 58% increase from the previous year. That includes 72 projects at an advanced stage of development, such as the $43bn Gorgon LNG project and the $20bn Olympic dam expansion. The mining services sector is poised to benefit from all of them.

The sector also stands to benefit from Australia's worsening skills shortage, with more companies looking to contractors to provide essential services in remote locations.

2. Less volatility

Resource stocks tend to fluctuate with commodity prices, which are subject to international economic forces and market sentiment beyond the control of any individual company. As a result, they are among the most volatile companies on the Australian sharemarket. But mining services stocks, while still exposed to the commodities cycle, tend to be more stable.

3. More predictable cash flow

One reason for the comparative volatility of commodity companies is that their cash flow can be very variable. In the development phase, they need to make significant capital expenditure, often leading to negative cash flows. And while they enjoy healthy revenues in the production phase, that revenue may diminish as a resource is exhausted, unless they make further investments in exploration and development.
In contrast, mining services companies require comparatively little capital investment, with more predictable cash flows over the long-term.

4. Higher dividends

Predictable cash flows and lower capital expenditures often allow services companies to pay out more of their earnings as dividends, making them more appealing for income-oriented investors.

5. No need to pick winners

Many miners are highly leveraged to demand for a single commodity, whether it's gold, coal, copper or iron ore. Some are reliant on a single mine or field. Whereas services companies generally have a more diversified customer base.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Tapping-The-Mining-Services-Goldmine&id=5924837

How Web Scraping Affects your Revenue Growth

How Web Scraping Affects your Revenue Growth

Web scraping is an indispensable resource when it comes to gaining an edge in the competition with the help of business intelligence. As more and more data gets created on the world wide web, the complexity of extracting it intensifies. Web scraping is a technology that demands an extensive tech stack, high end resources and technically skilled labour. Given this resource hungry nature, many businesses prefer outsourcing it to doing the scraping in-house. Here is a brief walk-through of web scraping so that you can get a grip on the whole process and understand how it could affect your revenue growth as a business.

Business intelligence

The competition among online businesses is at its peak. This has more to do with the ready availability of insightful data. When data acquisition at this scale wasn’t possible in the past, businesses made hit-or-miss decisions upon instincts. Now that every activity can be recorded, extracted as data and analysed to arrive at the best business decisions, companies are making the most of it to boost their revenue. This includes monitoring the activity of competitors on social media, price intelligence, sentiment analysis, gathering data for market research and much more. The use cases of web scraping in business is almost infinite. Business intelligence is extremely helpful for the survival of companies in a market that fluctuates often. Implementing a business intelligence strategy powered by web scraping can definitely give a boost to your revenue growth.
Cost centres involved in in-house Web Scraping

Web scraping, despite being a robust solution for extracting data from the web, is not going to be an easy path if your company is not technically rich already. It involves setting up resources like a tech stack and servers that can run the web crawler by a technically skilled team. Following are the primary cost centres involved in the web scraping process.

1. High end servers

Web scraping is a resource intensive process. Considering the importance of uptime here, the crawlers cannot be run on average performance machines. To have the optimum uptime and avoid crashes, the crawler has to be run on high performing servers located in different parts of the world. The quality of servers is crucial to the consistency of the process. Not to mention, these high end servers makeup for a significant amount of the cost involved in web scraping.

2. Technically skilled labour

Scanning through the source code to identify appropriate tags that hold the required data points and creating a program that can automatically fetch these data points from similar pages’ at large scale requires deep programming skills. It goes without saying that employing skilled people would incur cost that could take a hit on your revenue. Ideally, you will need a team of at least 10 to run a web scraping setup in-house.       

3. An extensive tech stack

Although most of the software being used for web scraping are open source, you will find yourself investing in paid software to make certain things easier or faster. Dealing with open source software might not be as user friendly as the paid ones. In any case, having a tech stack with a lot of options is a necessary aspect of web scraping that would incur additional cost.   

4. Maintenance

Building and running the web scraping setup is only half of the story. Since websites undergo changes often, there is a possibility of the crawler setup breaking from time to time. To avoid or solve this at the earliest, a monitoring system that involves both machines and humans is necessary. Monitoring and maintenance contribute to a considerable cost in the web scraping process.
Data as a service

If data for business is your requirement, a better way to acquire it would be to depend on a company that can deliver it via the data as a service route. Web scraping companies have already set up high-end resources required to run the web crawlers that you can utilize to avail web scraping at a much lower cost than what you would incur by doing it on your own. With this, you can also save yourself from the complications and maintenance headache associated with web scraping. Moreover, with a web scraping service, you can enjoy a much higher return on investment owing to the lowered cost of data acquisition. You can use our ROI calculator to compare between the cost of going with an in-house web scraping setup and a hosted solution.

Source: https://www.promptcloud.com/blog/web-scraping-affects-revenue-growth

How to use Web Content Extractor(WCE) as Email Scraper?

How to use Web Content Extractor(WCE) as Email Scraper?

Web Content Extractor is a great web scraping software developed by Newprosoft Team. The software has easy to use project wizard to create a scraping configuration and scrape data from websites.

One day I came to see the Visual Email Extractor which is also product of Newprosoft and similar to Web Content Extractor but it’s primary use is to scrape email addresses by crawling websites you feed to the scraper. I had noticed that with the little modification in Web Content Extractor project configuration you can use it same as Visual Email Extractor to extract email addresses.

In this post I will show you what configuration makes the Web Content Extractor to extract email addresses. I still recommend Visual Email Extractor as it has lot more features then extracting email using WCE.

Here are the configuration that makes WCE to Extract Emails.

Step 1 : Open Web Content Extractor and Create New Project and Click on Next.

Step 2:  Under Crawling Rules -> Advanced Rules Tab do the following settings

Crawling Level 1 Settings

Follow Links if link text equals:
*contact*; *feedback*; *support*; *about*

for 'Follow Links if link text equals' text box enter following values:
contact; feedback; support; about

for 'Do not Follow links if URL contains' text box enter following values:

google.; yahoo.; bing; msn.; altavista.; myspace.com; youtube.com; googleusercontent.com; =http; .jpg; .gif; .png; .bmp; .exe; .zip; .pdf;

Set 'Maximum Crawling Deapth' to 2

set 'Crawling Order' to Deapth First Crawling

Tick mark below below check boxes:

->Follow all internal links

  Crawling Level 2  Settings

set 'Follow links if link text equals' to below value

*contact*; *feedback*; *support*; *about*

set 'Follow links if url contains' text box to below value

contact; feedback; support; about

set 'DO NOT follow links if url contains' text box to below value

=http

Step 3 After doing above settings now click on Next  -> in Extraction Pattern window -> Click on Define ->  in Web Page Address (URL) give any URL where email is given.  and click on  + sign right of Date Fields to define scraping pattern.

Now inside HTML Structure selects HTML check box or Body check box which means for each page it will take whole page content to parse data.

Now last settings to extract emails from page using regular expression based email extraction function.  Open Predefined Script window and select ‘Extract_Email_Addresses‘ and click on OK. and if you have used page that contains email then in Script Result’ you will be able to see the harvested email.

Hope this will help you to use your Web Content Extractor as a Email Scraper.. Share your view in comment.

Source: http://webdata-scraping.com/use-web-content-extractor-as-email-scraper/

Run Code Template – New Feature Added to Fminer Web Scraping Tool

Run Code Template – New Feature Added to Fminer Web Scraping Tool

Fminer is one of the powerful web scraping software, I already given brief of all the Fminer features in previous post. In this post I am going to introduce one of the interesting feature of fminer which is Run Code Template that is recently added to Fminer, this feature is similar to “Fminer Run Code” action but it’s different in a way you can use it. The Run Code Action you can use inside the data scraping flow and python code get executed when scraper start running.

While Run Code Templates are the saved python code snippets that you can run on the data tables after scraping completes. Assume if you get white space in scraped data then you can easily trim this left and right spaces by just executing “strip_column” template, see the code of that template below.

'''Strip all data of a column in data table
Remove the blank of data in the head and the tail.
'''

tabName = '[%table1|data table%]'
colName = '[%table1.column1|table column for strip%]'

tab = tables[tabName]
for i, row in enumerate(tab):
    row[colName] = row[colName].strip()   
    tab.edit_row(i, row)

This template comes with Fminer and few other template like “merge_tables_with_same_columns”.  Below are the steps how you can execute template python code on scraped data.

Step 1: Click on second icon from right that says “Run Code” under the Data section

Step 2: One popup will appear, you need to click on “Templates” icon and choose the template you want to execute and then click on Ok.

Step 3: Now the window will appear for configuration that will ask you to choose the table and column under that table on which you want to execute the code. Now click on Ok again.

Step 4: Now you can see the code of that template, now you can click on execute icon and script will start running, based on number of records it will take time to finish execution.

In many web scraping projects I found this template code very handy for cleaning data and making life easy. Templates are stored at following path so you can create your own template with customized code.

C:\Program Files (x86)\FMiner\templates

I have created one template which I use to remove HTML code that comes while scraping badly organized HTML pages. Below is the code of template for stripping html:

'''Strip HTML will remove all html tags of a column in data table.
'''
import re
tabName = '[%table1|data table%]'
colName = '[%table1.column1|table column for substring%]'
colNew = '[%table1.column1|table column to add new data%]'
tab = tables[tabName]
for i, row in enumerate(tab):
    cleanr =re.compile('<.*?>')
    cleantext = re.sub(cleanr,'', row[colName])
    row[colNew] = cleantext 
    tab.edit_row(i, row)

Stay connected as I am going to post more code templates that will make your web scraping life easy and manipulate data on fly.

Source: http://webdata-scraping.com/run-code-template-new-feature-added-fminer-web-scraping-tool/

Calculate your ROI on Web Scraping using our ROI Calculator

Calculate your ROI on Web Scraping using our ROI Calculator

Staying atop the competition is a vital thing for the survival and growth of businesses these days. Ever since big data came into the picture, web scraping has become something businesses from every industry has to invest in. If your company is not in a technically advanced industry, web scraping could even be a nightmare to start with. Wondering if going with in-house web scraping is right for you? In house or outsourcing, in the end it’s all about the returns on investment.

ROI Calculator

Considering the numerous factors that determine how much web scraping can cost you, it’s not easy to calculate the ROI on your in-house web scraping.

In house web scraping is certainly a challenging process. If you plan on going down this way, here is a brief list of prerequisites.

Engineers

Technically skilled labour is an essential requirement for web scraping. Since, web scraping techniques are complicated, it needs good programming skills to write, run and maintain the scraping bots. The cost of labour can be one of the drawbacks with doing in house web scraping.

Hardware Resources

Web scraping is a resource hungry process which requires high end servers and lots of bandwidth. Without the adequate resources, you might end up losing important data. The cost of quality servers could easily make you want to reconsider doing web scraping on your own. Not to mention the doubling up of these resources in order to keep the data intact, espcially if you’re looking at large scale.

Maintainability and ukeep of your tech stack

Once you have your servers and other technical components setup, the real deal only starts. You have to ensure availability of your servers, data backups, restoring previous states, failovers, among many other complications associated with managing servers and fixing them up when something goes wrong. You need to allocate resources (both people and hardware) to take care of the above.

Time

Time is something that we cannot really include in the equation when it comes to calculating the returns. But it is definitely a factor that defines if web scraping in house is worth it. Although web scraping is the fastest way to acquire data, the initial setup and maintenance are time consuming and complicated. This could easily lead to conflicts when you have to distribute your time between web scraping and other business activities that are crucial for your company.

Try the ROI Calculator

We came up with an ROI calculator to easily calculate your returns on investment with our web scraping services. Using this, you could easily compare the cost of in house web scraping with PromptCloud’s dedicated web scraping services. Find out how much you can save by going the PromptCloud way.

Source: https://www.promptcloud.com/blog/calculate-roi-on-web-scraping

Why Healthcare Companies should look towards Web Scraping

Why Healthcare Companies should look towards Web Scraping

The internet is a massive storehouse of information which is available in the form of text, media and other formats. To be competitive in this modern world, most businesses need access to this storehouse of information. But, all this information is not freely accessible as several websites do not allow you to save the data. This is where the process of Web Scraping comes in handy.

Web scraping is not new—it has been widely used by financial organizations, for detecting fraud; by marketers, for marketing and cross-selling; and by manufacturers for maintenance scheduling and quality control. Web scraping has endless uses for business and personal users. Every business or individual can have his or her own particular need for collecting data. You might want to access data belonging to a particular category from several websites. The different websites belonging to the particular category display information in non-uniform formats. Even if you are surfing a single website, you may not be able to access all the data at one place.

The data may be distributed across multiple pages under various heads. In a market that is vast and evolving rapidly, strategic decision-making demands accurate and thorough data to be analyzed, and on a periodic basis. The process of web scraping can help you mine data from several websites and store it in a single place so that it becomes convenient for you to a alyze the data and deliver results.

In the context of healthcare, web scraping is gaining foothold gradually but qualitatively. Several factors have led to the use of web scraping in healthcare. The voluminous amount of data produced by healthcare industry is too complex to be analyzed by traditional techniques. Web scraping along with data extraction can improve decision-making by determining trends and patterns in huge amounts of intricate data. Such intensive analyses are becoming progressively vital owing to financial pressures that have increased the need for healthcare organizations to arrive at conclusions based on the analysis of financial and clinical data. Furthermore, increasing cases of medical insurance fraud and abuse are encouraging healthcare insurers to resort to web scraping and data extraction techniques.

Healthcare is no longer a sector relying solely on person to person interaction. Healthcare has gone digital in its own way and different stakeholders of this industry such as doctors, nurses, patients and pharmacists are upping their ante technologically to remain in sync with the changing times. In the existing setup, where all choices are data-centric, web scraping in healthcare can impact lives, educate people, and create awareness. As people no more depend only on doctors and pharmacists, web scraping in healthcare can improve lives by offering rational solutions.

To be successful in the healthcare sector, it is important to come up with ways to gather and present information in innovative and informative ways to patients and customers. Web scraping offers a plethora of solutions for the healthcare industry. With web scraping and data extraction solutions, healthcare companies can monitor and gather information as well as track how their healthcare product is being received, used and implemented in different locales. It offers a safer and comprehensive access to data allowing healthcare experts to take the right decisions which ultimately lead to better clinical experience for the patients.

Web scraping not only gives healthcare professionals access to enterprise-wide information but also simplifies the process of data conversion for predictive analysis and reports. Analyzing user reviews in terms of precautions and symptoms for diseases that are incurable till date and are still undergoing medical research for effective treatments, can mitigate the fear in people. Data analysis can be based on data available with patients and is one way of creating awareness among people.

Hence, web scraping can increase the significance of data collection and help doctors make sense of the raw data. With web scraping and data extraction techniques, healthcare insurers can reduce the attempts of frauds, healthcare organizations can focus on better customer relationship management decisions, doctors can identify effective cure and best practices, and patients can get more affordable and better healthcare services.

Web scraping applications in healthcare can have remarkable utility and potential. However, the triumph of web scraping and data extraction techniques in healthcare sector depends on the accessibility to clean healthcare data. For this, it is imperative that the healthcare industry think about how data can be better recorded, stored, primed, and scraped. For instance, healthcare sector can consider standardizing clinical vocabulary and allow sharing of data across organizations to heighten the benefits from healthcare web scraping practices.

Healthcare sector is one of the top sectors where data is multiplying exponentially with time and requires a planned and structured storage of data. Continuous web scraping and data extraction is necessary to gain useful insights for renewing health insurance policies periodically as well as offer affordable and better public health solutions. Web scraping and data extraction together can process the mammoth mounds of healthcare data and transform it into information useful for decision making.

To reduce the gap between various components of healthcare sector-patients, doctors, pharmacies and hospitals, healthcare organizations and websites will have to tap the technology to collect data in all formats and present in a usable form. The healthcare sector needs to overcome the lag in implementing effective web scraping and data extraction techniques as well as intensify their pace of technology adoption. Web scraping can contribute enormously to the healthcare industry and facilitate organizations to methodically collect data and process it to identify inadequacies and best practices that improve patient care and reduce costs.

Source: https://www.promptcloud.com/blog/why-health-care-companies-should-use-web-scraping