Powerful Web Scraping Software – Content Grabber Review
There are many web scraping software and cloud based web scraping services available in the market for extracting data from the websites. They vary widely in cost and features. In this article, I am going to introduce one such advanced web scraping tool “Content Grabber”, which is widely used and the best web scraping software in the market.
Content Grabber is used for web extraction, web scraping and web automation. It can extract content from complex websites and export it as structured data in a variety of formats like Excel Spreadsheets, XML, CSV and databases. Content Grabber can also extract data from highly dynamic websites. It can extract from AJAX-enabled websites, submit forms repeatedly to cover all possible input values, and manage website logins.
Content Grabber is designed to be reliable, scalable and customizable. It is specifically designed for users with a critical reliance on web scraping and web data extraction. It also enables you to make standalone web scraping agents which you can market and sell as your own royalty free web scraping software.
Applications of Content Grabber:
The following are the few applications of Content Grabber:
Content Grabber Features:
The following section highlights some of the key features of Content Grabber:
1. Point and Click Interface
The Content Grabber editor has an easy to use point and click interface that provides easy point and click configuration. One simply needs to click on web elements to configure website navigation and content capture.
2. Easy to Use
The Content Grabber point and click interface is so simple to use that it can easily be used by beginners and non-programmers. There is certain built in facilities that automatically detect and configure all commands. It will automatically create a list of links, lists of content, manage pagination, handle web pages, download or upload files and capture any action you perform on a web page. You can also manually configure the agent commands, so Content Grabber gives you both simplicity and control.
3. Reliable and Scalable
Content Grabber’s powerful features like testing and debugging, solid error handling and error recovery, allows agent to run in the most difficult scenarios. It easily handles and scrapes dynamic websites built with JavaScript and AJAX. Content Grabber’s Intelligent agents don’t break with most site structure changes. These features enable us to build reliable web scraping agents. There are various configurations and performance tuning options that makes Content Grabber scalable. You can build as many web scraping agents as you want with Content Grabber.
4. High Performance
Multi-threading is used to increase the performance in Content Grabber. Content Grabber uses optimized web browsers. It uses static browsers for static web pages and dynamic browsers for dynamic web pages. It has an ultra-fast HTML5 parser for ultra-fast web scraping. One can use many web browsers concurrently to boost performance.
5. Debugging, Logging and Error Handling
Content Grabber has robust support for debugging, error handling and logging. Using a debugger, you can test and debug the web scraping agents which helps you to build reliable and error free web scraping solutions because most of the issues are addressed at design time. Content Grabber allows agent logging with three detail levels: Log URLs, Log raw HTML, Log to database or file. Logs can be useful to identify problems that occurred during execution of a web scraping agent. Content Grabber supports automatic error handling and custom error handling through scripting. Error status reports can also be mailed to administrators.
6. Scripting
Content Grabber comes with a built in script editor with IntelliSense that one can use in case of some unusual requirements or to fine tune some process. Scripting can be used to control agent behaviour, content transformation, customize data export and delivery and to generate data inputs for agent.
7. Unlimited Web Scraping Agents
Content Grabber allows building an unlimited number of Self-Contained Web Scraping Agents. Self-Contained agents are a standalone executable that can be run independently, branded as your own and distributed royalty free. Content Grabber provides an easy to use and effective GUI to manage all the agents. One can view status and logs of all the agents or run and schedule the agents in one centralized location.
8. Automation
Require data on a schedule? Weekly? Everyday? Each hour? Content Grabber allows automating and publishing extracted data. Configure Content Grabber by telling what data you want once, and then schedule it to run automatically.
And much more
There are too many features that Content Grabber provides, but here are a few more that may be useful and interest you.
The above features come with the Professional edition license. Content Grabber’s Premium edition license is available with the following extra features:
1. Visual Studio 2013 integration
One can integrate Content Grabber to Visual Studio and take advantages of extra powerful script editing, debugging, and unit testing.
2. Remove Content Grabber branding
One can remove Content Grabber branding from the Content Grabber agents and distribute the executable.
3. Custom Design Templates
One can customize the Content Grabber agent user interface design with custom HTML templates – e.g. add your own company branding.
4. Royalty free distribution
One can distribute the Content Grabber agent to anybody without paying royalty fees and can run agents from the command line anywhere.
5. Programming Interface
Programming interfaces like Desktop API, Web API and windows service for building and editing agents.
6. Custom Web Scraping Application Development:
Content Grabber provides API and Visual Studio Integration which developer can use to build custom web scraping applications. It provides full control of the user interface and export functionality. One can develop both Desktop as well as Web based custom web scraping applications using the Content Grabber programming interface. It is a great tool and provides opportunity for developers to build general web scraping applications and sell those to generate revenue.
Are you looking for web scraping services? Do you need any assistance related to Content Grabber? We can probably help you to achieve your scraping-based project goals. We would be more than happy to hear from you.
Source: http://webdata-scraping.com/powerful-web-scraping-software-content-grabber/
There are many web scraping software and cloud based web scraping services available in the market for extracting data from the websites. They vary widely in cost and features. In this article, I am going to introduce one such advanced web scraping tool “Content Grabber”, which is widely used and the best web scraping software in the market.
Content Grabber is used for web extraction, web scraping and web automation. It can extract content from complex websites and export it as structured data in a variety of formats like Excel Spreadsheets, XML, CSV and databases. Content Grabber can also extract data from highly dynamic websites. It can extract from AJAX-enabled websites, submit forms repeatedly to cover all possible input values, and manage website logins.
Content Grabber is designed to be reliable, scalable and customizable. It is specifically designed for users with a critical reliance on web scraping and web data extraction. It also enables you to make standalone web scraping agents which you can market and sell as your own royalty free web scraping software.
Applications of Content Grabber:
The following are the few applications of Content Grabber:
- Data aggregation – for example news aggregation.
- Competitive pricing and monitoring e.g. monitor dealers for price compliance.
- Financial and Market Research e.g. Make proactive buying and selling decisions by continuously receiving corporate operational data.
- Content Integration i.e. integration of data from various sources at one place.
- Business Directory Scraping – for example: yellow pages scraping, yelp scraping, superpages scraping etc.
- Extracting company data from yellow pages for scraping common data fields like Business Name, Address, Telephone, Fax, Email, Website and Category of Business.
- Extracting eBay auction data like: eBay Product Name, Store Information, Buy it Now prices, Product Price, List Price, Seller Price and many more.
- Extracting Amazon product data: Information such as Product title, cost, description, details, availability, shipping info, ASIN, rating, rank, etc can be extracted.
Content Grabber Features:
The following section highlights some of the key features of Content Grabber:
1. Point and Click Interface
The Content Grabber editor has an easy to use point and click interface that provides easy point and click configuration. One simply needs to click on web elements to configure website navigation and content capture.
2. Easy to Use
The Content Grabber point and click interface is so simple to use that it can easily be used by beginners and non-programmers. There is certain built in facilities that automatically detect and configure all commands. It will automatically create a list of links, lists of content, manage pagination, handle web pages, download or upload files and capture any action you perform on a web page. You can also manually configure the agent commands, so Content Grabber gives you both simplicity and control.
3. Reliable and Scalable
Content Grabber’s powerful features like testing and debugging, solid error handling and error recovery, allows agent to run in the most difficult scenarios. It easily handles and scrapes dynamic websites built with JavaScript and AJAX. Content Grabber’s Intelligent agents don’t break with most site structure changes. These features enable us to build reliable web scraping agents. There are various configurations and performance tuning options that makes Content Grabber scalable. You can build as many web scraping agents as you want with Content Grabber.
4. High Performance
Multi-threading is used to increase the performance in Content Grabber. Content Grabber uses optimized web browsers. It uses static browsers for static web pages and dynamic browsers for dynamic web pages. It has an ultra-fast HTML5 parser for ultra-fast web scraping. One can use many web browsers concurrently to boost performance.
5. Debugging, Logging and Error Handling
Content Grabber has robust support for debugging, error handling and logging. Using a debugger, you can test and debug the web scraping agents which helps you to build reliable and error free web scraping solutions because most of the issues are addressed at design time. Content Grabber allows agent logging with three detail levels: Log URLs, Log raw HTML, Log to database or file. Logs can be useful to identify problems that occurred during execution of a web scraping agent. Content Grabber supports automatic error handling and custom error handling through scripting. Error status reports can also be mailed to administrators.
6. Scripting
Content Grabber comes with a built in script editor with IntelliSense that one can use in case of some unusual requirements or to fine tune some process. Scripting can be used to control agent behaviour, content transformation, customize data export and delivery and to generate data inputs for agent.
7. Unlimited Web Scraping Agents
Content Grabber allows building an unlimited number of Self-Contained Web Scraping Agents. Self-Contained agents are a standalone executable that can be run independently, branded as your own and distributed royalty free. Content Grabber provides an easy to use and effective GUI to manage all the agents. One can view status and logs of all the agents or run and schedule the agents in one centralized location.
8. Automation
Require data on a schedule? Weekly? Everyday? Each hour? Content Grabber allows automating and publishing extracted data. Configure Content Grabber by telling what data you want once, and then schedule it to run automatically.
And much more
There are too many features that Content Grabber provides, but here are a few more that may be useful and interest you.
- Schedule agents
- Manage proxies
- Custom notification criteria and messages
- Email notifications
- Handle websites logins
- Capture Screenshots of web elements or entire web page or save as PDF.
- Capture hidden content on web page.
- Crawl entire website
- Input data from almost any data source.
- Auto scroll to load dynamic data
- Handle complex JAVASCRIPT and AJAX actions
- XPATH support
- Convert Images to Text
- CAPTCHA handling
- Extract data from non-HTML documents like PDF and Word Documents
- Multi-threading and multiple web browsers
- Run agent from command line.
The above features come with the Professional edition license. Content Grabber’s Premium edition license is available with the following extra features:
1. Visual Studio 2013 integration
One can integrate Content Grabber to Visual Studio and take advantages of extra powerful script editing, debugging, and unit testing.
2. Remove Content Grabber branding
One can remove Content Grabber branding from the Content Grabber agents and distribute the executable.
3. Custom Design Templates
One can customize the Content Grabber agent user interface design with custom HTML templates – e.g. add your own company branding.
4. Royalty free distribution
One can distribute the Content Grabber agent to anybody without paying royalty fees and can run agents from the command line anywhere.
5. Programming Interface
Programming interfaces like Desktop API, Web API and windows service for building and editing agents.
6. Custom Web Scraping Application Development:
Content Grabber provides API and Visual Studio Integration which developer can use to build custom web scraping applications. It provides full control of the user interface and export functionality. One can develop both Desktop as well as Web based custom web scraping applications using the Content Grabber programming interface. It is a great tool and provides opportunity for developers to build general web scraping applications and sell those to generate revenue.
Are you looking for web scraping services? Do you need any assistance related to Content Grabber? We can probably help you to achieve your scraping-based project goals. We would be more than happy to hear from you.
Source: http://webdata-scraping.com/powerful-web-scraping-software-content-grabber/
