Internet is available with a number of websites. These websites contain numerous amount of data in them. Sometimes we need to extract that data for various purposes. Some of the important reasons for extraction of data include, competitor’s work study, market trends, general analysis and rank methodology. This technique of data extraction from website is known as web scraping. There are many ways to implement this technique and most common one is Scraper API.
To understand this technique first of all we have to learn what API is?
API or Application programing interface. It is actually a simple software available on websites to make data parsing possible in an easy way. It allows two applications to communicate to each other like it allows the communication of two or more applications. API is surely a gate way for web scraping. We do require some tricky and complex method for data parsing from a website if its API is absent. While doing so HTML markup is not scraped instead CSS or XPath selectors are used. That is why data scraping API is trusted and quite efficient way for this to be implemented.
As a coin has two sides, similarly there are some flaws of using scraper API technique. Some of them are stated here.
It is difficult to perform. For someone who is not a regular data API scraper, this process is very tricky to deal with. It creates difficult situations that a newbie cannot tackle. Similarly this process lacks the result authentication as well.
Data extracted from any website using this technique requires to be treated properly before making the analytical report. If not treated properly, it can create misunderstandings and confusions. So to deal with these particular situations, we have some alternatives available for data scraping API technique.
These alternatives are actually software that can be used to extract data from a website in an effective way similar to Scraper API. But surely a software is always better than a method because it contains preprogrammed solutions for various critical situations that a developer can face.
That is why these software are preferred. They are large in number but here we are going to discuss about some of them in detail.
Parse hub is a modern tool made for web scraping API. It is special due to its significance for modern web and its problems. It can deal with all of them in an efficient way
Scrapy is also very beneficial for data scraping. It is surely a software with an open source and collaborative framework for data parsing from a website. Its performance is very efficient. It provided us with reliable results of data parsing. It do not has any speed problem as well and for all these reasons it is very reliable source of extraction of data from any website we want.
Portia is another software we come across while discussing data extraction API. It is also an open source software that allows us to fetch any type of data from a website in effective and efficient way. It is a visual scraping tool and allows us to get data from any website without coding. These properties make this software a best choice for web scraping.
UiPath is a free software used considerably for data parsing. It is fully featured software that allows us to fetch data from any website. It’s major plus is that for individual web developers, teams and for various educational purposes its access is free of cost.
Import.io is another software that can be used as alternative of scraper API. It is also fully equipped software that allows developer to fetch data from any website without coding
Diggernaut is a software that is cloud based and is used for data scraping API’s alternative. We can utilize it for schedule scraping and on our personal computers as well.
ScrapeHunt is mostly used to fetch market related data. It is an efficient way to extract data related to costumers and marketing processes. It is also an effective alternate to web scraping API
Extracty is another alternate to data scraping API. It also works like above mentioned software do. It has ability to fetch data from any webpage with ease.
Above explained software are just examples of a few alternatives we can use for data scraping. There are many other as well. Basic reason behind use of them is that web developers are of many types. Some are skilled and experienced but others are just newbies. They are even not fully aware about scraped data results. They do not understand the difference between ordinary data parsing and targeted data parsing. If they are week in these concepts, they can never implement the tricky method of data parsing API with perfection. So these software can help them out as they can serve them as their practice session in field of Web scraping.