How to Crawl Data from a Website

Originally published as https://www.octoparse.com/blog/how-to-crawl-data-from-a-website/?utm_source=sale2022&utm_medium=crawldatafromawebsite&utm_campaign=medium.

Data crawling is used for data extraction and refers to collecting data from either the world wide web or from any document or file. The need for web data crawling has been on the rise in the past few years. The data crawled can be used for evaluation or prediction purposes under different circumstances, such as market analysis, price monitoring, lead generation, etc. Here, I’d like to introduce 3 ways to crawl data from a website, and the pros and cons of each approach.

Approach #1 — Use Ready-to-Use Crawler Tools

Are non-coders excluded from web crawling? The answer is “no”. There are ready-to-use web crawler tools that are specifically designed for users who need data but know nothing about coding.

Octoparse

With Octoparse, you can interact with any element on a webpage and design your own data extraction workflow. It allows in-depth customization of your own task to meet all your needs. Octoparse provides four editions of crawling service subscription plans — one Free Edition and three Paid Editions. The free plan is good enough for basic scraping/crawling needs.

If you switch your free edition to one of the paid editions, you can use Octoparse’s Cloud-based service and run your tasks on the Cloud Platform, enabling data crawling at a much higher speed and on a much larger scale. Plus, you can automate your data extraction and leave no trace using Octoparse’s anonymous proxy feature. That means your task will rotate through tons of different IPs, which will prevent you from being blocked by certain websites. Here’s a video introducing Octoparse’s Cloud Extraction.

Octoparse also provides API to connect your system to your scraped data in real-time. You can either import the Octoparse data into your own database or use the API to require access to your account’s data. After you finish configuring your task, you can export data into various formats, like CSV, Excel, HTML, TXT, and database (MySQL, SQL Server, and Oracle).

Mozenda

Mozenda is another user-friendly web data extractor. It has a point-and-click UI for users without any coding skills to use. Mozenda also takes the hassle out of automating and publishing extracted data…