Internet Scraper
Web Scraper – The #1 web scraping extension
More than
400, 000 users are proud of using our solutions!
Point and click
interface
Our goal is to make web data extraction as simple as possible.
Configure scraper by simply pointing and clicking on elements.
No coding required.
Extract data from dynamic
web sites
Web Scraper can extract data from sites with multiple levels of navigation. It can navigate a
website on all levels.
Categories and subcategories
Pagination
Product pages
Built for the modern web
Websites today are built on top of JavaScript frameworks that make user interface easier to use but
are less accessible to scrapers. Web Scraper solves this by:
Full JavaScript execution
Waiting for Ajax requests
Pagination handlers
Page scroll down
Modular selector system
Web Scraper allows you to build Site Maps from different types of selectors.
This system makes it possible to tailor data extraction to different site structures.
Export data in CSV, XLSX and JSON
formats
Build scrapers, scrape sites and export data in CSV format directly from your browser.
Use Web Scraper Cloud to export data in CSV, XLSX and JSON formats, access it via API, webhooks or
get it exported via Dropbox.
Diego Kremer
Simply AMAZING. Was thinking about coding myself a simple scraper for a project
and then found this super easy to use and very powerful scraper. Worked
perfectly with all the websites I tried on. Saves a lot of time. Thanks for
that!
Carlos Figueroa
Powerful tool that beats the others out there. Has a learning curve to it but
once you conquer that the sky’s the limit. Definitely a tool worth making a
donation on and supporting for continued development. Way to go for the
authoring crew behind this tool.
Jonathan H
This is fantastic! I’m saving hours, possibly days. I was trying to scrap and old
site, badly made, no proper divs or markup.
Using the WebScraper magic, it somehow “knew” the pattern after I selected 2
elements. Amazing.
Yes, it’s a learning curve and you HAVE to watch the video and read the docs.
Don’t rate it down just because you can’t be bothered to learn it. If you put
the effort in, this will save your butt one day!
Is Web Scraping Legal ? – WebHarvy
Web Scraping is the technique of automatically extracting data from websites using software/script. Our software, WebHarvy, can be used to easily extract data from any website without any coding/scripting knowledge.
Is it legal to scrape data from websites using software? The answer to this question is not a simple yes or no.
The real question here should be regarding how you plan to use the data which you have extracted from a website (either manually or via using software). Because the data displayed by most website is for public consumption. It is totally legal to copy this information to a file in your computer. But it is regarding how you plan to use this data that you should be careful about. If the data is downloaded for your personal use and analysis, then it is absolutely ethical. But in case you are planning to use it as your own, in your website, in a way which is completely against the interest of the original owner of the data, without attributing the original owner, then it is unethical, illegal.
Also, while extracting data from websites using software, since web scrapers can read and extract data from web pages more quickly than humans, care should be taken that the web scraping process does not affect the performance/bandwidth of the web server in any way. Most web servers will automatically block your IP, preventing further access to its pages, in case this happens.
Websites have their own ‘Terms of use’ and Copyright details whose links you can easily find in the website home page itself. The users of web scraping software/techniques should respect the terms of use and copyright statements of target websites. These refer mainly to how their data can be used and how their site can be accessed.
How to anonymously scrape data from websites?
Update: US federal court rules that web scraping does not violate hacking laws
Scrape Data Anonymously
WebHarvy is an easy-to-use visual web scraper which lets you scrape data anonymously from websites, thereby protecting your privacy. Proxy servers or VPNs can be easily used along with WebHarvy so that you are not connected directly to the web server during data extraction. Also, to minimize the load on web servers, and to avoid detection, there are options to automatically insert pauses & emulate a human user during the web scraping process.
About Price & Web Scraping Tools | Imperva
What is web scraping
Web scraping is the process of using bots to extract content and data from a website.
Unlike screen scraping, which only copies pixels displayed onscreen, web scraping extracts underlying HTML code and, with it, data stored in a database. The scraper can then replicate entire website content elsewhere.
Web scraping is used in a variety of digital businesses that rely on data harvesting. Legitimate use cases include:
Search engine bots crawling a site, analyzing its content and then ranking it.
Price comparison sites deploying bots to auto-fetch prices and product descriptions for allied seller websites.
Market research companies using scrapers to pull data from forums and social media (e. g., for sentiment analysis).
Web scraping is also used for illegal purposes, including the undercutting of prices and the theft of copyrighted content. An online entity targeted by a scraper can suffer severe financial losses, especially if it’s a business strongly relying on competitive pricing models or deals in content distribution.
Scraper tools and bots
Web scraping tools are software (i. e., bots) programmed to sift through databases and extract information. A variety of bot types are used, many being fully customizable to:
Recognize unique HTML site structures
Extract and transform content
Store scraped data
Extract data from APIs
Since all scraping bots have the same purpose—to access site data—it can be difficult to distinguish between legitimate and malicious bots.
That said, several key differences help distinguish between the two.
Legitimate bots are identified with the organization for which they scrape. For example, Googlebot identifies itself in its HTTP header as belonging to Google. Malicious bots, conversely, impersonate legitimate traffic by creating a false HTTP user agent.
Legitimate bots abide a site’s file, which lists those pages a bot is permitted to access and those it cannot. Malicious scrapers, on the other hand, crawl the website regardless of what the site operator has allowed.
Resources needed to run web scraper bots are substantial—so much so that legitimate scraping bot operators heavily invest in servers to process the vast amount of data being extracted.
A perpetrator, lacking such a budget, often resorts to using a botnet—geographically dispersed computers, infected with the same malware and controlled from a central location. Individual botnet computer owners are unaware of their participation. The combined power of the infected systems enables large scale scraping of many different websites by the perpetrator.
Malicious web scraping examples
Web scraping is considered malicious when data is extracted without the permission of website owners. The two most common use cases are price scraping and content theft.
Price scraping
In price scraping, a perpetrator typically uses a botnet from which to launch scraper bots to inspect competing business databases. The goal is to access pricing information, undercut rivals and boost sales.
Attacks frequently occur in industries where products are easily comparable and price plays a major role in purchasing decisions. Victims of price scraping can include travel agencies, ticket sellers and online electronics vendors.
For example, smartphone e-traders, who sell similar products for relatively consistent prices, are frequent targets. To remain competitive, they’re motivated to offer the best prices possible, since customers usually go for the lowest cost offering. To gain an edge, a vendor can use a bot to continuously scrape his competitors’ websites and instantly update his own prices accordingly.
For perpetrators, a successful price scraping can result in their offers being prominently featured on comparison websites—used by customers for both research and purchasing. Meanwhile, scraped sites often experience customer and revenue losses.
Content scraping
Content scraping comprises large-scale content theft from a given site. Typical targets include online product catalogs and websites relying on digital content to drive business. For these enterprises, a content scraping attack can be devastating.
For example, online local business directories invest significant amounts of time, money and energy constructing their database content. Scraping can result in it all being released into the wild, used in spamming campaigns or resold to competitors. Any of these events are likely to impact a business’ bottom line and its daily operations.
The following is excerpted from a complaint, filed by Craigslist, detailing its experience with content scraping. It reinforces how damaging the practice can be:
“[The content scraping service] would, on a daily basis, send an army of digital robots to craigslist to copy and download the full text of millions of craigslist user ads. [The service] then indiscriminately made those misappropriated listings available—through its so-called ‘data feed’—to any company that wanted to use them, for any purpose. Some such ‘customers’ paid as much as $20, 000 per month for that content…”
According to the claim, scraped data was used for spam and email fraud, among other activities:
“[The defendants] then harvest craigslist users’ contact information from that database, and initiate many thousands of electronic mail messages per day to the addresses harvested from craigslist servers…. [The messages] contain misleading subject lines and content in the body of the spam messages, designed to trick craigslist users into switching from using craigslist’s services to using [the defenders’] service…”
Web scraping protection
The increased sophistication in malicious scraper bots has rendered some common security measures ineffective. For example, headless browser bots can masquerade as humans as they fly under the radar of most mitigation solutions.
To counter advances made by malicious bot operators, Imperva uses granular traffic analysis. It ensures that all traffic coming to your site, human and bot alike, is completely legitimate.
The process involves the cross verification of factors, including:
HTML fingerprint – The filtering process starts with a granular inspection of HTML headers. These can provide clues as to whether a visitor is a human or bot, and malicious or safe. Header signatures are compared against a constantly updated database of over 10 million known variants.
IP reputation – We collect IP data from all attacks against our clients. Visits from IP addresses having a history of being used in assaults are treated with suspicion and are more likely to be scrutinized further.
Behavior analysis – Tracking the ways visitors interact with a website can reveal abnormal behavioral patterns, such as a suspiciously aggressive rate of requests and illogical browsing patterns. This helps identify bots that pose as human visitors.
Progressive challenges – We use a set of challenges, including cookie support and JavaScript execution, to filter out bots and minimize false positives. As a last resort, a CAPTCHA challenge can weed out bots attempting to pass themselves off as humans.
Learn more about protecting your site from malicious bot traffic with Imperva’s bot management solution.
Frequently Asked Questions about internet scraper
Is Web scraping legal?
Web Scraping is the technique of automatically extracting data from websites using software/script. … Because the data displayed by most website is for public consumption. It is totally legal to copy this information to a file in your computer.
What is a scraper on the Internet?
Web scraping is the process of using bots to extract content and data from a website. … The scraper can then replicate entire website content elsewhere. Web scraping is used in a variety of digital businesses that rely on data harvesting.
How do you scrape Internet data?
How do we do web scraping?Inspect the website HTML that you want to crawl.Access URL of the website using code and download all the HTML contents on the page.Format the downloaded content into a readable format.Extract out useful information and save it into a structured format.More items…•Jul 15, 2020
