Groupon Scraper
How to Scrape Groupon Deals and Data | ParseHub
Groupon is one of the largest marketplaces for local businesses to find customers rough Groupon, local businesses can directly target Groupon’s large userbase with exclusive by boasting 45. 3 million active users in Q3 2019, Groupon attracts a lot of businesses to their a result, the product and business data on Groupon’s website can be incredibly valuable. For example, it could give you great insight into deals that your competitors are offering on the ever, manually extracting data from Groupon’s site could be extremely time-consuming and inconvenient. Here’s where Web Scraping comes into oupon and Web ScrapingA web scraper will allow you to select the specific data you’d like to extract from Groupon and download it as an Excel spreadsheet or JSON could even setup your scraper to run on a schedule and export your results to Google Sheets, in order to always have access to the most recent this example, we will scrape the Greater Toronto Area Deals page in Groupon. We will extract data on deals, prices, reviews, and do this, we will use ParseHub, a free and powerful web scraper that can easily complete this to Scrape Groupon DataIt’s time to get scraping. First, make sure to download and install ParseHub for ParseHub, click on “New Project” and enter the Groupon URL you want to scrape. The page will now render in the app.
Start by clicking on the business name of the first result on the page. It will be highlighted in green to indicate is has been selected. Click on the second business name in the list to select all the listings on the the left sidebar, rename your selection to business.
ParseHub is now pulling the business name and the deal URL.
Now, click on the PLUS (+) sign next to your business selection and choose the Relative Select the Relative Select command, click on the business name of the first result and then on its rating score. An arrow will appear to indicate the relationship between these data your new command to rating.
Expand the rating command and remove its URL extraction, since this URL is already being steps 5-8 to extract more data such as number of reviews, deal price, offer percentage, offer details and business address. Your final project should look like this:Interested in scraping images from this page as well? Check out our guide on how to scrape and download images from any rseHub is now extracting the data you have selected from every result on the first page of results. We will now instruct ParseHub to navigate to the next pages of results and extract more, click on the PLUS (+) sign next to your page selection and choose the Select the Select command, scroll all the way to the bottom of the page and click on the “Next Page” button. Rename your selection to your next selection and remove both extract commands under on the PLUS (+) sign next to your next selection and choose the Click command. A pop-up will appear asking you if this a next page button. Click “Yes” and enter the number of times you’d like to repeat this process. For this example, we will repeat it 5 times. Then click on the “Repeat Current Template”, select your click command and under it, tick the “Uses AJAX” oupon’s website does not load all results on a page unless the user scrolls further down the a result, we will need to tell ParseHub to scroll to the bottom of the page before it starts extracting data from the, click on the PLUS (+) sign next to your page selection, click on Advanced and choose “Scroll”, drag your new scroll command to the top of your project (right under the page selection). Your project should look like this:Running Your ScrapeYou are now ready to run your scrape job. To do this, click on the green “Get Data” button on the left, you will be able to choose if you want to test your scrape run, schedule it for later or run it right away. For larger scrape jobs, we recommend that you test your run first to verify everything is working correctly. In this case, we will just run it right rseHub will now go and scrape the data you’ve selected. Once the scrape is completed, you’ll be able to download your scrape as an Excel or JSON file. Avoiding BlocksGroupon might sometimes block you from scraping their website. Your scrape jobs will come back blank when this order to get around this, you’ll have to enable IP Rotation on ParseHub, which is a paid enable it, click on the setting icon on the top left of your project and tick the “Enable IP Rotation” box. Then go back and run your scrape job osing ThoughtsAnd that’s all that there is to it! You know now how to scrape data from Groupon’s can also repeat this process with search result pages and other listing you run into any issues, you can contact us via chat or email and we’ll be happy to assist Scraping! Download ParseHub for Free
5 Things You Need to Know Before Scraping Data From Facebook
1. Actually, Facebook disallows any scraper, according to its file.
When planning to scrape a website, you should always check its first. is a file used by websites to let “bots” know if or how the site should be scrapped or crawled and indexed. You could access the file by adding “/” by the end of the link to your target website.
Enter in your browser, and let’s check the robots file of Facebook. These two lines could be found at the bottom of the file:
The lines state that Facebook prohibits all automated scrapers. That is, no part of the website should be visited by an automated crawler.
Why do we need to respect
Websites use the robots file to specify a set of rules on how you or a bot should interact with them. When a website blocks all access to crawlers, the best thing to do is to leave that site alone. To follow the robots file is to avoid unethical data gathering as well as any legal ramifications.
2. Technically, the only legal way to collect data from Facebook with a crawler is to obtain a prior written permission
Facebook warns at the very beginning of their robots file: “Crawling Facebook is prohibited unless you have express written permission. ”
Check the link on the second line, you could find Facebook’s Automated Data Collection Terms, last revised on April 15th, 2010.
Like any other terms and conditions in the world, Facebook Automated Data Collection Terms are long (in abnormally small font size) and full of legal terms that few people could fully understand.
These terms look so familiar, as we would see them each time we install a new app on our mobile phone or sign up for a website.
“By obtaining permission to…you agree to abide by…”
“You agree that you will not…”
“You agree that any violation of these terms may result in…”
However, they may not be the same innocent.
As the social media giant, Facebook has money, time and a dedicated legal team. If you proceed with scraping Facebook by ignoring their Automated Data Collection Terms, that’s OK, but just be warned that they have been reminded you to at least obtain “written permission”. Sometimes they could be quite aggressive towards illegitimate scraping.
3. But surely you are still able to scrape data from Facebook as you need
If you have done crawling without respecting the, it doesn’t mean you would get into legal complications because you’ve violated the rules.
Data scraped from social media is undoubtedly the largest and most dynamic dataset about human behavior and real-world events. For more than a decade, researchers and business experts around the world have harvested information from Facebook using scrapers, producing representative samples to understand individuals, groups and society, as well as exploring brand new opportunities hidden in the data.
For users, they would agree that the use of social data is not always a bad thing. For example, it is the use of social data to personalize marketing that keeps the internet free and makes the ads and content we see more relevant.
Tools you could use for obtaining Facebook data
In response to the public outcry following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook implemented dramatic access restrictions on its APIs in April last year.
Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are software interfaces designed for consumption by computer programs, which allow people to retrieve large-scale data with automated processes. Nowadays many companies provide a public API as a means for users, researchers and third-party app developers to access their infrastructure.
Facebook’s API lockdown and radical data access restrictions as an attempt to protect its user information are quite arguable. But still, as a result, now people are left with only one choice.
Without APIs, now we could only obtain Facebook data through the interfaces for users, that is, the web pages. This is exactly when web scrapers come into play. We have written a blog about some best social media scraping tools. Check our article Top 5 Social Media Scraping Tools for 2020.
4. After GDPR in force, however, there’s more chance to get sued if you’re trying to scrape personal data
Before scraping data from Facebook, learn about GDPR compliance in web scraping could help.
The EU General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR as it is more commonly known, came into force on 25th May 2018. It is said to be the most important change in data privacy regulation in 20 years, setting to force sweeping changes in everything from technology to advertising, and medicine to banking.
Companies or organizations that hold and process large amounts of consumer data, such as technology firms like Facebook, are affected the most under GDPR. Before it was all up to these companies to enforce the rules to protect user data. Now under GDPR, they need to make sure they are in full compliance with the law.
The good news is…
GDPR only applies to personal data.
Here “personal data” refers to the data that could be used to directly or indirectly identify a specific individual. This kind of information is known as Personally Identifiable Information(PII), which includes a person’s name, physical address, email address, phone number, IP address, date of birth, employment info and even video/audio recording.
If you aren’t scraping personal data, then GDPR does not apply.
In short, unless you have the person’s explicit consent it is now illegal to scrape an EU resident personal data under GDPR.
5. And you could try Facebook alternative sources for your scraping project
As mentioned above, though Facebook prohibits all automated crawlers, it is still technically feasible to scrape data from the site. The problem is —
It is risky.
Apart from the legal ramifications, you could find that it may get harder to retrieve the desired data on a regular basis, as Facebook block suspicious IPs, and could even implement harder blocking mechanisms in the future, which may make scraping data from the site totally impossible.
Hence, it is recommended to look for more reliable sources for social media data to gain business intelligence and insights on your target market.
Four data sources alternative to Facebook
Twitter
With about 500 million tweets generated per day, Twitter is a sea of information that can be used as a great source for brand monitoring and customer sentiment measurement. Unlike Facebook, Twitter allows people to retrieve data on a large scale via Twitter’s APIs.
Reddit
Having as many users as Twitter, Reddit is one of the greatest sources of UGC (User Generated Content) in the world. Reddit also provides public APIs that can be used for a variety of purposes such as data collection, automatic commenting bots, or even to assist in subreddit moderation.
VKontakte (VK)
VK is a Russian social media platform geared toward Russians and other Eastern European users. By far, it boasts over 90 million unique visitors per month, and 9 billion page views every day. As a Russian company, VK adheres to Russian laws, and if you check its robots file you’ll find it is quite friendly with crawlers.
Instagram
Owned by Facebook, Instagram focuses more on visual content sharing, especially videos and pictures. The platform is used by many brands to humanize their content for better connecting customers and growing brand awareness. Alongside Facebook’s data lockdown last year, however, Instagram has also implemented radical restrictions on data access, which made the site much less reliable than before.
日本語記事：Facebookからデータを収集する前に知っておくべき5つのことWebスクレイピングについての記事は 公式サイトでも読むことができます。Artículo en español: 5 Cosas que Debes Saber Antes de Scraping de FacebookTambién puede leer artículos de web scraping en el Website Oficial
Written by: Ellen Y (The Octoparse Team)
Edit: Ashley Weldon
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Is Web Scraping Illegal? Depends on What the Meaning of the Word Is
Depending on who you ask, web scraping can be loved or hated.
Web scraping has existed for a long time and, in its good form, it’s a key underpinning of the internet. “Good bots” enable, for example, search engines to index web content, price comparison services to save consumers money, and market researchers to gauge sentiment on social media.
“Bad bots, ” however, fetch content from a website with the intent of using it for purposes outside the site owner’s control. Bad bots make up 20 percent of all web traffic and are used to conduct a variety of harmful activities, such as denial of service attacks, competitive data mining, online fraud, account hijacking, data theft, stealing of intellectual property, unauthorized vulnerability scans, spam and digital ad fraud.
So, is it Illegal to Scrape a Website?
So is it legal or illegal? Web scraping and crawling aren’t illegal by themselves. After all, you could scrape or crawl your own website, without a hitch.
Startups love it because it’s a cheap and powerful way to gather data without the need for partnerships. Big companies use web scrapers for their own gain but also don’t want others to use bots against them.
The general opinion on the matter does not seem to matter anymore because in the past 12 months it has become very clear that the federal court system is cracking down more than ever.
Let’s take a look back. Web scraping started in a legal grey area where the use of bots to scrape a website was simply a nuisance. Not much could be done about the practice until in 2000 eBay filed a preliminary injunction against Bidder’s Edge. In the injunction eBay claimed that the use of bots on the site, against the will of the company violated Trespass to Chattels law.
The court granted the injunction because users had to opt in and agree to the terms of service on the site and that a large number of bots could be disruptive to eBay’s computer systems. The lawsuit was settled out of court so it all never came to a head but the legal precedent was set.
In 2001 however, a travel agency sued a competitor who had “scraped” its prices from its Web site to help the rival set its own prices. The judge ruled that the fact that this scraping was not welcomed by the site’s owner was not sufficient to make it “unauthorized access” for the purpose of federal hacking laws.
Two years later the legal standing for eBay v Bidder’s Edge was implicitly overruled in the “Intel v. Hamidi”, a case interpreting California’s common law trespass to chattels. It was the wild west once again. Over the next several years the courts ruled time and time again that simply putting “do not scrape us” in your website terms of service was not enough to warrant a legally binding agreement. For you to enforce that term, a user must explicitly agree or consent to the terms. This left the field wide open for scrapers to do as they wish.
Fast forward a few years and you start seeing a shift in opinion. In 2009 Facebook won one of the first copyright suits against a web scraper. This laid the groundwork for numerous lawsuits that tie any web scraping with a direct copyright violation and very clear monetary damages. The most recent case being AP v Meltwater where the courts stripped what is referred to as fair use on the internet.
Previously, for academic, personal, or information aggregation people could rely on fair use and use web scrapers. The court now gutted the fair use clause that companies had used to defend web scraping. The court determined that even small percentages, sometimes as little as 4. 5% of the content, are significant enough to not fall under fair use. The only caveat the court made was based on the simple fact that this data was available for purchase. Had it not been, it is unclear how they would have ruled. Then a few months back the gauntlet was dropped.
Andrew Auernheimer was convicted of hacking based on the act of web scraping. Although the data was unprotected and publically available via AT&T’s website, the fact that he wrote web scrapers to harvest that data in mass amounted to “brute force attack”. He did not have to consent to terms of service to deploy his bots and conduct the web scraping. The data was not available for purchase. It wasn’t behind a login. He did not even financially gain from the aggregation of the data. Most importantly, it was buggy programing by AT&T that exposed this information in the first place. Yet Andrew was at fault. This isn’t just a civil suit anymore. This charge is a felony violation that is on par with hacking or denial of service attacks and carries up to a 15-year sentence for each charge.
In 2016, Congress passed its first legislation specifically to target bad bots — the Better Online Ticket Sales (BOTS) Act, which bans the use of software that circumvents security measures on ticket seller websites. Automated ticket scalping bots use several techniques to do their dirty work including web scraping that incorporates advanced business logic to identify scalping opportunities, input purchase details into shopping carts, and even resell inventory on secondary markets.
To counteract this type of activity, the BOTS Act:
Prohibits the circumvention of a security measure used to enforce ticket purchasing limits for an event with an attendance capacity of greater than 200 persons.
Prohibits the sale of an event ticket obtained through such a circumvention violation if the seller participated in, had the ability to control, or should have known about it.
Treats violations as unfair or deceptive acts under the Federal Trade Commission Act. The bill provides authority to the FTC and states to enforce against such violations.
In other words, if you’re a venue, organization or ticketing software platform, it is still on you to defend against this fraudulent activity during your major onsales.
The UK seems to have followed the US with its Digital Economy Act 2017 which achieved Royal Assent in April. The Act seeks to protect consumers in a number of ways in an increasingly digital society, including by “cracking down on ticket touts by making it a criminal offence for those that misuse bot technology to sweep up tickets and sell them at inflated prices in the secondary market. ”
In the summer of 2017, LinkedIn sued hiQ Labs, a San Francisco-based startup. hiQ was scraping publicly available LinkedIn profiles to offer clients, according to its website, “a crystal ball that helps you determine skills gaps or turnover risks months ahead of time. ”
You might find it unsettling to think that your public LinkedIn profile could be used against you by your employer.
Yet a judge on Aug. 14, 2017 decided this is okay. Judge Edward Chen of the U. S. District Court in San Francisco agreed with hiQ’s claim in a lawsuit that Microsoft-owned LinkedIn violated antitrust laws when it blocked the startup from accessing such data. He ordered LinkedIn to remove the barriers within 24 hours. LinkedIn has filed to appeal.
The ruling contradicts previous decisions clamping down on web scraping. And it opens a Pandora’s box of questions about social media user privacy and the right of businesses to protect themselves from data hijacking.
There’s also the matter of fairness. LinkedIn spent years creating something of real value. Why should it have to hand it over to the likes of hiQ — paying for the servers and bandwidth to host all that bot traffic on top of their own human users, just so hiQ can ride LinkedIn’s coattails?
I am in the business of blocking bots. Chen’s ruling has sent a chill through those of us in the cybersecurity industry devoted to fighting web-scraping bots.
I think there is a legitimate need for some companies to be able to prevent unwanted web scrapers from accessing their site.
In October of 2017, and as reported by Bloomberg, Ticketmaster sued Prestige Entertainment, claiming it used computer programs to illegally buy as many as 40 percent of the available seats for performances of “Hamilton” in New York and the majority of the tickets Ticketmaster had available for the Mayweather v. Pacquiao fight in Las Vegas two years ago.
Prestige continued to use the illegal bots even after it paid a $3. 35 million to settle New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s probe into the ticket resale industry.
Under that deal, Prestige promised to abstain from using bots, Ticketmaster said in the complaint. Ticketmaster asked for unspecified compensatory and punitive damages and a court order to stop Prestige from using bots.
Are the existing laws too antiquated to deal with the problem? Should new legislation be introduced to provide more clarity? Most sites don’t have any web scraping protections in place. Do the companies have some burden to prevent web scraping?
As the courts try to further decide the legality of scraping, companies are still having their data stolen and the business logic of their websites abused. Instead of looking to the law to eventually solve this technology problem, it’s time to start solving it with anti-bot and anti-scraping technology today.
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Frequently Asked Questions about groupon scraper
How do I scrape a Groupon?
Scrape information from Groupon”Go To Web Page” – open the targeted web page.Create a pagination loop – scrape all the results from multiple pages.Create a “Loop Item” – loop click into each item on each list.Extract data – select the data for extraction.Start extraction – run the task and get data.Dec 22, 2020
Is Facebook scraper legal?
The lines state that Facebook prohibits all automated scrapers. That is, no part of the website should be visited by an automated crawler.Aug 12, 2021
Is Page scraping legal?
Web scraping and crawling aren’t illegal by themselves. … Web scraping started in a legal grey area where the use of bots to scrape a website was simply a nuisance. Not much could be done about the practice until in 2000 eBay filed a preliminary injunction against Bidder’s Edge.
