Web Crawler Services
Best Web Crawler Services/Companies in 2021 | Octoparse
About Web Crawling Service
Web data crawling or scraping is becoming increasingly popular in the last few years. The scraped data can be used for various analyses, even predictions. By analyzing the data, people can gain insight into one industry and take on other competitors. Here, we can see how useful and necessary it is to get high-quality data at a faster speed and on a large scale. Also, higher demand for data has driven the fast growth of Web Crawler Service.
Web Crawler Service can be found easily if you search it via Google. More exactly, it is one kind of customized Paid Service. Every time you’d like to crawl a web site or any data set, you need to pay for the service provider and then you can get the crawled data you want. There is something you should notice, you must be careful with the service provider you choose and express your data requirements as clear and exclusive as possible. I will propose some Web Crawler Service I used or learned for your reference. Anyway, the evaluation of services is hard since those services continuously evolve to serve the customer better. The best way to decide is what your requirements are and what is on offer, map them and rank them by yourself.
Web Crawler Services Recommended
1. DataHen
DataHen is known as a professional Web Crawler Service Provider. It has offered well-rounded and patient service, covering all levels of data crawling or scraping requirements from personal, startups and enterprises. You will not need to buy or learn a scraping software by using DataHen. They are able to fill up forms when being obfuscated by certain sites which require authentications. The UI is straightforward to understand, as can be seen below, you only need to fill out the required information and they will deliver the data you need to crawl.
2. Grepsr
Grepsr is a powerful Crawler Service platform which provides multi-kinds of user data crawling needs. To communicate better with users, Grepsr has provided quite clear and all-inclusive requirements gathering user interface as below. There are also three editions of the Paid Plan of Grepsr from Starters to Enterprises. Users can choose any plan based on their respective crawling needs.
3. Octoparse
Octoparse should be defined as a web scraping tool, even though it also offers customized data crawlers service. Octoparse Web Crawler Service is powerful as well. Tasks can be scheduled to run on the Cloud Platform which includes at least 6 Cloud Servers working simultaneously. It also supports IP rotations, which prevents getting blocked by certain websites. Plus, Octoparse API allows users to connect their system to their scraped data in real-time. Users can either import the Octoparse data into your own DB, or use the API to require access to their account’s data. Plus, Octoparse provides a Free Edition Extraction Plan. The Free Edition can also meet the basic needs of scraping or crawling from users. Anyone can use it to scrape or crawl data after you register an account. The only thing is that you need to learn to configure the basic scraping rules to crawl data you need, anyway, it is easy to grasp the configuration skills. The UI is clear and straightforward to understand, as can be seen in the figure below. By the way, their back-up service is professional, users with any doubts can contact them directly and get feedback and solutions ASAP.
Artículo en español: Servicio de Web Crawler (Rastreador Web)También puede leer artículos de web scraping en El Website Oficial
Author: The Octoparse Team
Top 20 Web Scraping Tools to Scrape the Websites Quickly
Top 30 Big Data Tools for Data Analysis
Web Scraping Templates Take Away
How to Build a Web Crawler – A Guide for Beginners
Video: Create Your First Scraper with Octoparse 7. X
Web Crawling Service for Enterprise – ScrapeHero
We are a leader in web crawling service globally and crawl publicly available data at very high speeds and with high accuracy. Combine the data we gather with your private data to propel your enterprise don’t have to worry about setting up servers and web crawling tools or software. We provide the best web scraping service and do everything for you. Just tell us what data you need and we will manage the data crawling for you
Crawl complex websitesWe crawl data from almost all kinds of websites – eCommerce, News, Job Boards, Social Networks, Forums and even ones with IP Blacklisting and Anti-Bot Measures
High Speed Web CrawlingOur web crawling platform is built for heavy workloads. We are capable of scraping 3000 pages per second for websites with moderate anti-scraping measures. This is useful for Enterprise-grade web crawling
Schedule Crawling TasksOur fault tolerant job scheduler can run web crawling tasks without missing a beat. We have fail-safe measures that ensure that your web crawling jobs are run on schedule
High Data QualityOur web crawling service has built-in automated checks to remove duplicate data, re-crawl invalid data, and perform advanced data validations using Machine Learning to monitor the quality of the data extracted
Access data in any formatAccess crawled data in any way you want – JSON, CSV, XML, etc. You can also stream directly from our API OR have it delivered to Dropbox, Amazon S3, Box, Google Cloud Storage, FTP, etc
ETL AssistanceWe can perform complex and custom transformations – custom filtering, insights, fuzzy product matching, fuzzy de-duplication on large sets of data using open source tools
Web crawling is an automated method of accessing publicly available websites and gathering the content from those websites. Google and other search engines use web crawler spiders or bots to traverse the Internet and collect the text, images, video from those sites and index these websites. This Google web index is what we all use when we access Google. Web crawling mimics how a person would visit a website and then navigate around the website by clicking on links, look at images, videos etc and then gather some of that data by copying and pasting it into a spreadsheet. Our web crawling software automates this process and executes it much faster and at a much larger crawling is an indispensable technology that is used by the world’s most successful companies to gather data from the Internet. Web crawling helps saves billions or more dollars lost in productivity when employees perform the crawling, copy pasting actions repeatedly every day globally. It also increases the accuracy of the data and the volume of data that can be extracted and used for business or research purposes.
How our web crawling service works
Requirements You tell us what data you need to crawl and from which websites
Build and CrawlWe crawl the data using our highly distributed web crawling software
Deliver DataWe deliver clean usable data in your preferred format and location
Aggregate and Analyze NewsAggregate news articles from thousands of news sources, for analyzing mentions, educational research etc. You can do this without building thousands of scrapers using our advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) based news detection platform
Data Feeds for Job MonitoringCollect Job Posting by crawling hundreds of thousands of job sites and careers pages across the web. Use the data crawling to build Job Aggregator websites, research, and analysis of job postings. Use job postings as competitive intelligence to stay ahead of the competition
Conduct Background ResearchConduct background research for the reputation of individuals or businesses, by crawling reputed online sources and applying text classification and sentiment analysis on the gathered data
Compare and Monitor Product PricesGet real-time updates on Pricing, Product Availability and other details of products across eCommerce websites by crawling them at your own custom intervals. Make smarter and real-time decisions to stay price competitive
Why chose ScrapeHero’s Web Crawling Service
ScrapeHero is one of the best data providers in the world for a reason.
Customer FocusCustomer “happiness”, not just “satisfaction” drives our wonderful customer experience. Our customers love to work with us, and we have a 98% customer retention rate as a result. We have real humans that will talk to you within minutes of your request and help you with your need
Data QualityOur automated data quality checks utilize artificial intelligence and machine learning to identify data quality issues. Over time we have invested heavily in improving our data quality processes and validation using a combination of automated and manual methods and pass on the benefits to our customers at no extra cost
ScalabilityOur platform was built for scale – capable of crawling the web at thousands of pages per second and extracting data from millions of web pages daily. Our global infrastructure makes large-scale data extraction easy and painless by handling complex JavaScript/Ajax sites, CAPTCHA, IP blacklisting transparently
Our customers range from startups to massive Fortune 50 companies and everything in between. Our customers value their privacy, and we expect you would too. They trust us with their privacy and as a result, we don’t publicly publish our customer names and logos promise you your privacy and guard it fiercely
Alternative DataWe have been gathering Alternative Data for our customers for many years and can identify, gather and analyze this data for you. The competitive advantages of this data are enormous.
Price MonitoringGet data feeds of pricing, product availability and other details of products across eCommerce websites, directly in your preferred data format and at your own custom intervals.
We also provide a subscription for this data, find out more by clicking here
Real Time APIWe build APIs for websites that do not provide an API or have data-limited APIs. Most websites can be turned into an API to enable your cloud applications to tap into the data stream using a simple API call.
We also provide a subscription for this data, find out more by clicking here
What is a web crawler? | How web spiders work | Cloudflare
What is a web crawler bot?
A web crawler, spider, or search engine bot downloads and indexes content from all over the Internet. The goal of such a bot is to learn what (almost) every webpage on the web is about, so that the information can be retrieved when it’s needed. They’re called “web crawlers” because crawling is the technical term for automatically accessing a website and obtaining data via a software program.
These bots are almost always operated by search engines. By applying a search algorithm to the data collected by web crawlers, search engines can provide relevant links in response to user search queries, generating the list of webpages that show up after a user types a search into Google or Bing (or another search engine).
A web crawler bot is like someone who goes through all the books in a disorganized library and puts together a card catalog so that anyone who visits the library can quickly and easily find the information they need. To help categorize and sort the library’s books by topic, the organizer will read the title, summary, and some of the internal text of each book to figure out what it’s about.
However, unlike a library, the Internet is not composed of physical piles of books, and that makes it hard to tell if all the necessary information has been indexed properly, or if vast quantities of it are being overlooked. To try to find all the relevant information the Internet has to offer, a web crawler bot will start with a certain set of known webpages and then follow hyperlinks from those pages to other pages, follow hyperlinks from those other pages to additional pages, and so on.
It is unknown how much of the publicly available Internet is actually crawled by search engine bots. Some sources estimate that only 40-70% of the Internet is indexed for search – and that’s billions of webpages.
What is search indexing?
Search indexing is like creating a library card catalog for the Internet so that a search engine knows where on the Internet to retrieve information when a person searches for it. It can also be compared to the index in the back of a book, which lists all the places in the book where a certain topic or phrase is mentioned.
Indexing focuses mostly on the text that appears on the page, and on the metadata* about the page that users don’t see. When most search engines index a page, they add all the words on the page to the index – except for words like “a, ” “an, ” and “the” in Google’s case. When users search for those words, the search engine goes through its index of all the pages where those words appear and selects the most relevant ones.
*In the context of search indexing, metadata is data that tells search engines what a webpage is about. Often the meta title and meta description are what will appear on search engine results pages, as opposed to content from the webpage that’s visible to users.
How do web crawlers work?
The Internet is constantly changing and expanding. Because it is not possible to know how many total webpages there are on the Internet, web crawler bots start from a seed, or a list of known URLs. They crawl the webpages at those URLs first. As they crawl those webpages, they will find hyperlinks to other URLs, and they add those to the list of pages to crawl next.
Given the vast number of webpages on the Internet that could be indexed for search, this process could go on almost indefinitely. However, a web crawler will follow certain policies that make it more selective about which pages to crawl, in what order to crawl them, and how often they should crawl them again to check for content updates.
The relative importance of each webpage: Most web crawlers don’t crawl the entire publicly available Internet and aren’t intended to; instead they decide which pages to crawl first based on the number of other pages that link to that page, the amount of visitors that page gets, and other factors that signify the page’s likelihood of containing important information.
The idea is that a webpage that is cited by a lot of other webpages and gets a lot of visitors is likely to contain high-quality, authoritative information, so it’s especially important that a search engine has it indexed – just as a library might make sure to keep plenty of copies of a book that gets checked out by lots of people.
Revisiting webpages: Content on the Web is continually being updated, removed, or moved to new locations. Web crawlers will periodically need to revisit pages to make sure the latest version of the content is indexed.
requirements: Web crawlers also decide which pages to crawl based on the protocol (also known as the robots exclusion protocol). Before crawling a webpage, they will check the file hosted by that page’s web server. A file is a text file that specifies the rules for any bots accessing the hosted website or application. These rules define which pages the bots can crawl, and which links they can follow. As an example, check out the file.
All these factors are weighted differently within the proprietary algorithms that each search engine builds into their spider bots. Web crawlers from different search engines will behave slightly differently, although the end goal is the same: to download and index content from webpages.
Why are web crawlers called ‘spiders’?
The Internet, or at least the part that most users access, is also known as the World Wide Web – in fact that’s where the “www” part of most website URLs comes from. It was only natural to call search engine bots “spiders, ” because they crawl all over the Web, just as real spiders crawl on spiderwebs.
Should web crawler bots always be allowed to access web properties?
That’s up to the web property, and it depends on a number of factors. Web crawlers require server resources in order to index content – they make requests that the server needs to respond to, just like a user visiting a website or other bots accessing a website. Depending on the amount of content on each page or the number of pages on the site, it could be in the website operator’s best interests not to allow search indexing too often, since too much indexing could overtax the server, drive up bandwidth costs, or both.
Also, developers or companies may not want some webpages to be discoverable unless a user already has been given a link to the page (without putting the page behind a paywall or a login). One example of such a case for enterprises is when they create a dedicated landing page for a marketing campaign, but they don’t want anyone not targeted by the campaign to access the page. In this way they can tailor the messaging or precisely measure the page’s performance. In such cases the enterprise can add a “no index” tag to the landing page, and it won’t show up in search engine results. They can also add a “disallow” tag in the page or in the file, and search engine spiders won’t crawl it at all.
Website owners may not want web crawler bots to crawl part or all of their sites for a variety of other reasons as well. For instance, a website that offers users the ability to search within the site may want to block the search results pages, as these are not useful for most users. Other auto-generated pages that are only helpful for one user or a few specific users should also be blocked.
What is the difference between web crawling and web scraping?
Web scraping, data scraping, or content scraping is when a bot downloads the content on a website without permission, often with the intention of using that content for a malicious purpose.
Web scraping is usually much more targeted than web crawling. Web scrapers may be after specific pages or specific websites only, while web crawlers will keep following links and crawling pages continuously.
Also, web scraper bots may disregard the strain they put on web servers, while web crawlers, especially those from major search engines, will obey the file and limit their requests so as not to overtax the web server.
How do web crawlers affect SEO?
SEO stands for search engine optimization, and it is the discipline of readying content for search indexing so that a website shows up higher in search engine results.
If spider bots don’t crawl a website, then it can’t be indexed, and it won’t show up in search results. For this reason, if a website owner wants to get organic traffic from search results, it is very important that they don’t block web crawler bots.
What web crawler bots are active on the Internet?
The bots from the major search engines are called:
Google: Googlebot (actually two crawlers, Googlebot Desktop and Googlebot Mobile, for desktop and mobile searches)
Bing: Bingbot
Yandex (Russian search engine): Yandex Bot
Baidu (Chinese search engine): Baidu Spider
There are also many less common web crawler bots, some of which aren’t associated with any search engine.
Why is it important for bot management to take web crawling into account?
Bad bots can cause a lot of damage, from poor user experiences to server crashes to data theft. However, in blocking bad bots, it’s important to still allow good bots, such as web crawlers, to access web properties. Cloudflare Bot Management allows good bots to keep accessing websites while still mitigating malicious bot traffic. The product maintains an automatically updated allowlist of good bots, like web crawlers, to ensure they aren’t blocked. Smaller organizations can gain a similar level of visibility and control over their bot traffic with Super Bot Fight Mode, available on Cloudflare Pro and Business plans.
Frequently Asked Questions about web crawler services
What is a web crawler used for?
A web crawler, or spider, is a type of bot that is typically operated by search engines like Google and Bing. Their purpose is to index the content of websites all across the Internet so that those websites can appear in search engine results.
What is web scraping services?
Web scraping, web harvesting, or web data extraction is data scraping used for extracting data from websites. … While web scraping can be done manually by a software user, the term typically refers to automated processes implemented using a bot or web crawler.
Which web crawler is best?
Top 20 web crawler tools to scrape the websitesCyotek WebCopy. WebCopy is a free website crawler that allows you to copy partial or full websites locally into your hard disk for offline reading. … HTTrack. … Octoparse. … Getleft. … Scraper. … OutWit Hub. … ParseHub. … Visual Scraper.More items…•Jun 3, 2017