Assuming you have to gather substantial data from a site online. The process will be laborious and time-consuming. Naturally, you would like to find an easier way to complete this task as soon as possible. But here’s the question, how could you save time and energy without manually browsing each website page?

The short answer is “web scraping.” 

Web scraping is the most straightforward and speedy approach to pulling copious data from websites. And in this article, you will find five tools to help you go from 0 to web scraping mastery in no time.

1. Crawly 

If you’re looking for a way to master web scraping quickly, look no further than Crawly. This tool is ideal for extracting a website’s primary data in CSV format. It enables you to work with the data without the need for any coding.  

All you have to do is to insert the correct URL, an email id to receive the extracted data, and your preferred file format. You may choose between JSON or CSV formats if you have the right proxy, like NetNut proxies.  

Just like that, you’ll have an entire website’s collected data in any inbox you choose. If you want to take things further, use Matplotlib, Pandas, or some other programming language to analyze your JSON data.  

Conversely, those unfamiliar with data science can make do with the CSV file. Some HTML tags you can derive using Crawly include Author, Title, publisher, URL, and Image.  

2. Content Grabber  

The second in this list is Content Grabber, a versatile tool for scraping a website when you don’t intend to use any specifics. You can use the simple interface to reduce the learning curve. After you get the hang of it, you may use their full fleet of extraction parameters to personalize your collected data.  

One key upside to Content Grabber is the ability to schedule an automatic web scraping. This means you can have access to any website’s updated information since most websites receive regular updates – thus, saving users the trouble of regularly performing repeated scaping of the same URL.  

In addition, you get to export in different formats like MySQL, CSV, SQL Server, and JSON.  

3. Common Crawl  

The creators of Common Crawl designed it with the belief that every web user should easily access and analyze data across the web for deeper insights.  

Therefore Common Crawl can help users with top-notch data previously accessible only to large corporations and research bodies. The best part, any interested party can get large volumes of data free of charge due to the open-source background of this tool.  

Simply put, you don’t have to fret about weekly, monthly, or yearly fees with Common Crawl. Therefore, students, newbies, and professionals can take advantage of this tool, provided they’re interested in data science. 

Common Crawl makes available word extractions and raw web data as open datasets. So you can use the data from webpages to explore new insights into major business industries and discover trends.

4. Scrapingbee  

Second to last is Scrapingbee, a unique scraping tool that will provide you with an API for handling even the most cumbersome Javascript pages, enabling users to process them into raw HTML files. This tool also has a different API for web scraping through Google search.
You can begin exploring web scraping today using Scrapingbee in any one of the three approaches:  

  • General web scraping, for instance, collecting stock prices or customer reviews. 
  • Extracting social media data or contact information for growth hacking. 
  • Search engine result page used for SEO or keyword monitoring.
     

You can begin today using their free plan, which offers 1000 credits.  

5. ParseHub 

ParseHub is a potent tool for scraping information from the web that’s at the disposal of everyone for free. It offers simple data extraction with a focus on safety and accuracy. Users can also customize the frequency of their scraping operations of a given URL. 

One of its many benefits is that it easily scrapes even the most complex websites. Data collecting can be guided by user-specified actions like filling out forms, logging into websites, or clicking on maps or images.

Users can also input a wide range of keywords and URLs, from which it can quickly retrieve relevant data. Finally, using REST API, you can download your analysis-ready CSV or JSON.  

Conclusion

In the current data-driven economies of the world, things are moving at an unprecedented pace. The exponential increase in data means individuals, companies, and institutions must leverage the latest data analytics methods to be competitive. 

With web scraping, you don’t only help you collect data, but you only get to clean, preprocess, and analyze this data using methods like machine learning tools in Python. With these five approaches, you’re well on mastering web scraping.