Wednesday, 30 November 2016

How Web Data Extraction Services Will Save Your Time and Money by Automatic Data Collection

How Web Data Extraction Services Will Save Your Time and Money by Automatic Data Collection

Data scrape is the process of extracting data from web by using software program from proven website only. Extracted data any one can use for any purposes as per the desires in various industries as the web having every important data of the world. We provide best of the web data extracting software. We have the expertise and one of kind knowledge in web data extraction, image scrapping, screen scrapping, email extract services, data mining, web grabbing.

Who can use Data Scraping Services?

Data scraping and extraction services can be used by any organization, company, or any firm who would like to have a data from particular industry, data of targeted customer, particular company, or anything which is available on net like data of email id, website name, search term or anything which is available on web. Most of time a marketing company like to use data scraping and data extraction services to do marketing for a particular product in certain industry and to reach the targeted customer for example if X company like to contact a restaurant of California city, so our software can extract the data of restaurant of California city and a marketing company can use this data to market their restaurant kind of product. MLM and Network marketing company also use data extraction and data scrapping services to to find a new customer by extracting data of certain prospective customer and can contact customer by telephone, sending a postcard, email marketing, and this way they build their huge network and build large group for their own product and company.

We helped many companies to find particular data as per their need for example.

Web Data Extraction

Web pages are built using text-based mark-up languages (HTML and XHTML), and frequently contain a wealth of useful data in text form. However, most web pages are designed for human end-users and not for ease of automated use. Because of this, tool kits that scrape web content were created. A web scraper is an API to extract data from a web site. We help you to create a kind of API which helps you to scrape data as per your need. We provide quality and affordable web Data Extraction application

Data Collection

Normally, data transfer between programs is accomplished using info structures suited for automated processing by computers, not people. Such interchange formats and protocols are typically rigidly structured, well-documented, easily parsed, and keep ambiguity to a minimum. Very often, these transmissions are not human-readable at all. That's why the key element that distinguishes data scraping from regular parsing is that the output being scraped was intended for display to an end-user.

Email Extractor

A tool which helps you to extract the email ids from any reliable sources automatically that is called a email extractor. It basically services the function of collecting business contacts from various web pages, HTML files, text files or any other format without duplicates email ids.

Screen scrapping

Screen scraping referred to the practice of reading text information from a computer display terminal's screen and collecting visual data from a source, instead of parsing data as in web scraping.

Data Mining Services

Data Mining Services is the process of extracting patterns from information. Datamining is becoming an increasingly important tool to transform the data into information. Any format including MS excels, CSV, HTML and many such formats according to your requirements.

Web spider

A Web spider is a computer program that browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner or in an orderly fashion. Many sites, in particular search engines, use spidering as a means of providing up-to-date data.

Web Grabber

Web grabber is just a other name of the data scraping or data extraction.

Web Bot

Web Bot is software program that is claimed to be able to predict future events by tracking keywords entered on the Internet. Web bot software is the best program to pull out articles, blog, relevant website content and many such website related data We have worked with many clients for data extracting, data scrapping and data mining they are really happy with our services we provide very quality services and make your work data work very easy and automatic.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?How-Web-Data-Extraction-Services-Will-Save-Your-Time-and-Money-by-Automatic-Data-Collection&id=5159023

Wednesday, 24 August 2016

Three Common Methods For Web Data Extraction

Three Common Methods For Web Data Extraction

Probably the most common technique used traditionally to extract data from web pages this is to cook up some regular expressions that match the pieces you want (e.g., URL's and link titles). Our screen-scraper software actually started out as an application written in Perl for this very reason. In addition to regular expressions, you might also use some code written in something like Java or Active Server Pages to parse out larger chunks of text. Using raw regular expressions to pull out the data can be a little intimidating to the uninitiated, and can get a bit messy when a script contains a lot of them. At the same time, if you're already familiar with regular expressions, and your scraping project is relatively small, they can be a great solution.

Other techniques for getting the data out can get very sophisticated as algorithms that make use of artificial intelligence and such are applied to the page. Some programs will actually analyze the semantic content of an HTML page, then intelligently pull out the pieces that are of interest. Still other approaches deal with developing "ontologies", or hierarchical vocabularies intended to represent the content domain.

There are a number of companies (including our own) that offer commercial applications specifically intended to do screen-scraping. The applications vary quite a bit, but for medium to large-sized projects they're often a good solution. Each one will have its own learning curve, so you should plan on taking time to learn the ins and outs of a new application. Especially if you plan on doing a fair amount of screen-scraping it's probably a good idea to at least shop around for a screen-scraping application, as it will likely save you time and money in the long run.

So what's the best approach to data extraction? It really depends on what your needs are, and what resources you have at your disposal. Here are some of the pros and cons of the various approaches, as well as suggestions on when you might use each one:

Raw regular expressions and code

Advantages:

- If you're already familiar with regular expressions and at least one programming language, this can be a quick solution.

- Regular expressions allow for a fair amount of "fuzziness" in the matching such that minor changes to the content won't break them.

- You likely don't need to learn any new languages or tools (again, assuming you're already familiar with regular expressions and a programming language).

- Regular expressions are supported in almost all modern programming languages. Heck, even VBScript has a regular expression engine. It's also nice because the various regular expression implementations don't vary too significantly in their syntax.

Disadvantages:

- They can be complex for those that don't have a lot of experience with them. Learning regular expressions isn't like going from Perl to Java. It's more like going from Perl to XSLT, where you have to wrap your mind around a completely different way of viewing the problem.

- They're often confusing to analyze. Take a look through some of the regular expressions people have created to match something as simple as an email address and you'll see what I mean.

- If the content you're trying to match changes (e.g., they change the web page by adding a new "font" tag) you'll likely need to update your regular expressions to account for the change.

- The data discovery portion of the process (traversing various web pages to get to the page containing the data you want) will still need to be handled, and can get fairly complex if you need to deal with cookies and such.

When to use this approach: You'll most likely use straight regular expressions in screen-scraping when you have a small job you want to get done quickly. Especially if you already know regular expressions, there's no sense in getting into other tools if all you need to do is pull some news headlines off of a site.

Ontologies and artificial intelligence

Advantages:

- You create it once and it can more or less extract the data from any page within the content domain you're targeting.

- The data model is generally built in. For example, if you're extracting data about cars from web sites the extraction engine already knows what the make, model, and price are, so it can easily map them to existing data structures (e.g., insert the data into the correct locations in your database).

- There is relatively little long-term maintenance required. As web sites change you likely will need to do very little to your extraction engine in order to account for the changes.

Disadvantages:

- It's relatively complex to create and work with such an engine. The level of expertise required to even understand an extraction engine that uses artificial intelligence and ontologies is much higher than what is required to deal with regular expressions.

- These types of engines are expensive to build. There are commercial offerings that will give you the basis for doing this type of data extraction, but you still need to configure them to work with the specific content domain you're targeting.

- You still have to deal with the data discovery portion of the process, which may not fit as well with this approach (meaning you may have to create an entirely separate engine to handle data discovery). Data discovery is the process of crawling web sites such that you arrive at the pages where you want to extract data.

When to use this approach: Typically you'll only get into ontologies and artificial intelligence when you're planning on extracting information from a very large number of sources. It also makes sense to do this when the data you're trying to extract is in a very unstructured format (e.g., newspaper classified ads). In cases where the data is very structured (meaning there are clear labels identifying the various data fields), it may make more sense to go with regular expressions or a screen-scraping application.

Screen-scraping software

Advantages:

- Abstracts most of the complicated stuff away. You can do some pretty sophisticated things in most screen-scraping applications without knowing anything about regular expressions, HTTP, or cookies.

- Dramatically reduces the amount of time required to set up a site to be scraped. Once you learn a particular screen-scraping application the amount of time it requires to scrape sites vs. other methods is significantly lowered.

- Support from a commercial company. If you run into trouble while using a commercial screen-scraping application, chances are there are support forums and help lines where you can get assistance.

Disadvantages:

- The learning curve. Each screen-scraping application has its own way of going about things. This may imply learning a new scripting language in addition to familiarizing yourself with how the core application works.

- A potential cost. Most ready-to-go screen-scraping applications are commercial, so you'll likely be paying in dollars as well as time for this solution.

- A proprietary approach. Any time you use a proprietary application to solve a computing problem (and proprietary is obviously a matter of degree) you're locking yourself into using that approach. This may or may not be a big deal, but you should at least consider how well the application you're using will integrate with other software applications you currently have. For example, once the screen-scraping application has extracted the data how easy is it for you to get to that data from your own code?

When to use this approach: Screen-scraping applications vary widely in their ease-of-use, price, and suitability to tackle a broad range of scenarios. Chances are, though, that if you don't mind paying a bit, you can save yourself a significant amount of time by using one. If you're doing a quick scrape of a single page you can use just about any language with regular expressions. If you want to extract data from hundreds of web sites that are all formatted differently you're probably better off investing in a complex system that uses ontologies and/or artificial intelligence. For just about everything else, though, you may want to consider investing in an application specifically designed for screen-scraping.

As an aside, I thought I should also mention a recent project we've been involved with that has actually required a hybrid approach of two of the aforementioned methods. We're currently working on a project that deals with extracting newspaper classified ads. The data in classifieds is about as unstructured as you can get. For example, in a real estate ad the term "number of bedrooms" can be written about 25 different ways. The data extraction portion of the process is one that lends itself well to an ontologies-based approach, which is what we've done. However, we still had to handle the data discovery portion. We decided to use screen-scraper for that, and it's handling it just great. The basic process is that screen-scraper traverses the various pages of the site, pulling out raw chunks of data that constitute the classified ads. These ads then get passed to code we've written that uses ontologies in order to extract out the individual pieces we're after. Once the data has been extracted we then insert it into a database.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Three-Common-Methods-For-Web-Data-Extraction&id=165416

Friday, 12 August 2016

How to Scrape a Website into Excel without programming

How to Scrape a Website into Excel without programming

This web scraping tutorial will teach you visually step by step how to scrape or extract or pull data from websites using import.io(Free Tool) without programming skills into Excel.

Personally, I use web scraping for analysing my competitors’ best-performing blog posts or content such as what blog posts or content received most comments or social media shares.

In this tutorial,We will scrape the following data from a blog:

    All blog posts URLs.
    Authors names for each post.
    Blog posts titles.
    The number of social media shares each post received.

Then we will use the extracted data to determine what are the popular blog posts and their authors,which posts received much engagement from users through social media shares and on page comments.

Let’s get started.

Step 1:Install import.io app

The first step is to install import.io app.A free web scraping tool and one of the best web scraping software.It is available for Windows,Mac and Linux platforms.Import.io offers advanced data extraction features without coding by allowing you to create custom APIs or crawl entire websites.

After installation, you will need to sign up for an account.It is completely free so don’t worry.I will not cover the installation process.Once everything is set correctly you will see something similar to the window below after your first login.

Step 2:Choose how to scrape data using import.io extractor

With import.io you can do data extraction by creating custom APIs or crawling the entire websites.It comes equipped with different tools for data extraction such as magic,extractor,crawler and connector.

In this tutorial,I will use a tool called “extractor” to create a custom API for our data extraction process.

To get started click the “new” red button on the right top of the page and then click “Start Extractor” button on the pop-up window.

After clicking  “Start Extractor” the Import.io app internal browser window will open as shown below.

Step 3:Data scraping process

Now after the import.io browser is open navigate to the blog URL you want to scrape data from. Then once you already navigated to the target blog URL turn on extraction.In this tutorial,I will use this blog URL bongo5.com  for data extraction.

You can see from the window below I already navigated to www.bongo5.com but extraction switch is still off.

Turn extraction switch “ON” as shown in the window below and move to the next step.

Step 4:Training the “columns” or specifying the data we want to scrape

In this step,I will specify exactly what kind of data I want to scrape from the blog.On import.io app specifying the data you want to scrape is referred to as “training the columns”.Columns represent the data set I want to scrape(post titles,authors’ names and posts URLs).

In order to understand this step, you need to know the difference between a blog page and a blog post.A page might have a single post or multiple posts depending on the blog configuration.

A blog might have several blog posts,even hundreds or thousands of posts.But I will take only one session to train the “extractor” about the data I want to extract.I will do so by using an import.io visual highlighter.Once the data extraction is turned on the-the highlighter will appear by default.

I will do the training session for a single post in a single blog page with multiple posts then the extractor will extract data automatically for the remaining posts on the “same” blog page.
Step 4a:Creating “post_title” column

I will start by renaming “my_column” into the name of the data I want to scrape.Our goal in this tutorial is to scrape the blog posts titles,posts URLs,authors names and get social statistics later so I will create columns for posts titles,posts URLs,authors names.Later on, I will teach you how to get social statistics for the post URLs.

After editing “my_column” into “post_title” then point the mouse cursor over to any of the Posts title on the same blog page and the visual highlighter will automatically appear.Using the highlighter I can select the data I want to extract.

You can see below I selected one of the blog post titles on the page.The rectangular box with orange border is the visual highlighter.

The app will ask you how is the data arranged on the page.Since I have more than one post in a single page then you have rows of repeating data.This blog is having 25 posts per page.So you will select “many rows”.Sometimes you might have a single post on a page for that case you need to select “Just one row”.

Source: http://nocodewebscraping.com/web-scraping-for-dummies-tutorial-with-import-io-without-coding/

Friday, 5 August 2016

Invest in Data Extraction to Grow Your Business

Invest in Data Extraction to Grow Your Business

Automating your employees’ processes can help you increase productivity while keeping the cost of used resources at a minimum. This can help you focus your time and money in much needed areas of your company so that you can thrive in your industry. Data extraction can help you achieve automation by targeting online data sources (websites, blogs, forums, etc) for information and data that can be useful to your business. By using software rather than your employees, you can oftentimes get more accurate data and more thorough information that people may miss. The software can handle the volume that you need and will deliver the results that you desire to help your company.
See the Power of Data Extraction Online

To see all of the ways that data extraction tools and software can benefit your business, There you can read about the features of the software, practical uses for businesses and also schedule a demo before you buy.

Source: http://www.connotate.com/invest-in-data-extraction-to-grow-your-business/

Sunday, 24 May 2015

Wordpress Content Migration - Migrating Your Website to a CMS

Content Management Systems...sound complicated, right? Well, they're actually not. In fact, Content Management Systems (CMS for short) are quite the opposite. If you're currently struggling with your website, or if you're in the process of having a website built, consider installing or migrating to a CMS. If you can type a Word document, you can pretty much manage your website's content with a Content Management System.

A CMS is a web application that creates your web pages. Having a CMS system installed when your website is created allows you, the site owner, the ability to edit on page text with tools very similar to the tools you use to edit a Word document. This simplicity is designed to allow everyday users to create and manage the site's content with little to no difficulty.

Content Management Systems make static, unchanging web pages a thing of the past as they empower the site owner the ability to edit at one's whim. Need to add a new blog post? No problem. Update your 'About Us' section? Not a problem. Converting a website to a Content Management System is not only beneficial for those that have a website that needs constant updating but having a CMS is also cost effect as site owners can rely on themselves, or their employees, to update content, add images, add a video, etc. practically eliminating the need to contract a web designer for simple on-site edits.

Wordpress and Drupal are two popular and notable Content Management Systems. These CMS's are important to mention because they are free open-source applications. The systems themselves have several active developers working on adding custom features, known as "plug-ins". Plug-ins, or available website add-ons, include shopping carts, photo-galleries, social media widgets, etc. The availability of plug-ins reduce the time it takes to initially develop the website and allows for website flexibility and growth as websites that utilize a CMS can easily expand their website's capability. The availability of plug-ins also reduces production costs as plug-ins have to be installed rather than made from scratch.

More importantly, a CMS helps your customers have a positive online experience with your organization and allows you to build and maintain a website that can grow with your needs. The ability to manage your website's content also ensures that you can keep your website relevant for your company and your customers. If you're thinking about migrating your website to a CMS don't hesitate, take your business and your website to the next level by implementing a Content Management System into your site.

Enable IT Solutions are seasoned professionals that provide CMS development and CMS website conversions that include current website evaluation, interface and navigation re-design, programming and set-up, training and education for website owners, administrator support and "hand-holding" and hosting and software management. So, if you need a web site of your own, or realize it's finally time for an upgrade, but have no idea where to start contact Enable IT Solutions, you'll be glad you did.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Migrating-Your-Website-to-a-CMS&id=6066102

Monday, 18 May 2015

Dedicated WordPress Developer for WordPress Customization

Why to hire dedicated expert for custom WordPress theme/ template customization? By means of customization and integration, a person can build a custom website powered by WordPress. However, the proper customization of theme needs a specialized person with an extensive knowledge. This brings skilled WordPress programmer into real picture.

A web developer plays very significant role in customization of web template to build a unique web portal by using incredibly successful state-of-the-art publishing platform and CMS WordPress. A dedicated expert is the most reliable person able to customize and integrate PSD format based files into open source WordPress theme/ template encoded with strong HTML/ XHTML/ CSS mark-up languages efficiently.

The custom web-development is consider most effective solution to design a good quality website. With the help of customization and integration of web template/theme, a professional provide completely different look to particular site. By this way, a web programmer add high level of interactivity, usability, accessibility and functionality in a custom online portal.

Hiring professional from web development company is an important decision because it is directly associated with improved online presence of particular website. A well designed and SEO semantic portal powered by WordPress can bring high traffic rate, positive Return On Investment, immediate brand recognition and so on. Therefore, an individual should carefully select web programmer for custom theme/ template customization.

Some important questions about hiring dedicated expert from web development company which every person should ask for are discuss in brief:
  •     How many projects had completed by particular developer till date?
  •     What is the basic educational qualification of a coder?
  •     Is particular programmer proficient in MySQL, PHP, JavaScript, Ajax, jQuery, HTML and CSS?
  •     What is the total cost of hiring and mode of payment?
  •     Is particular expert hold experience of 5+ years in WordPress customization and integration?
  •     Can I have a look to the work done by particular professional?
  •     Is there any quality assurance?
  •     What about availability at the time of emergency?

So, it is advisable to consider all the above discussed questions while hiring dedicated WordPress developer for custom WordPress theme/template customization.

For more information to PSD to WordPress conversion and WordPress developer please visit CSSCHOPPER.com today.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Dedicated-WordPress-Developer-for-WordPress-Customization&id=5214258

Friday, 15 May 2015

WordPress, Joomla, Drupal or Custom Website

New clients usually contact me and ask me, "Should I have WordPress, Joomla, Drupal or a custom website for my business?" Even though the answer to this question includes many factors, I walk them through ten major disadvantages of using the Content Management System (CMS) like WordPress, Joomla and Drupal, so that they can make a right decision. Because of its importance and our expertise in custom application developments, I am inspired to write this article. For the sake of simplicity, I refer to WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal as CMS in the rest of this article:

I. Bugs And Errors

It is common to experience bugs and errors due to two reasons:

1. The CMS software engine updates at a higher frequency relative to other CMS plug-ins and libraries which causes website glitches.

2. Sometimes a new version of one CMS plug-in does not work properly with another plug-in or library which results in the website malfunctioning.

II. Pain Of Maintenances

As I had mentioned, you need to watch for all of the software patches or updates, and check them against all of the plug-ins or libraries used in your website. The CMS ideas were meant for dynamic contents, like bloggers or news companies, rather than basic static websites with static contents. As a result, it is not a cost-effective choice for static-based websites.

III. Differentiation Matters

Company branding and identity development starts from a company website and/or a mobile App. No matter what marketing budgets you have, customers associate your website with your products or services and, of course, your brand. It takes five-ten seconds after the first visit to a website to understand the company image and identity. The essence of differentiation is to stand your website out from the competitors while creating a sense of uniqueness for what they get. Indeed, it is only when your special organic contents are accompanied by a professional custom-made website that you gain competitive advantage over the other competitors.

IV. Security Is Missing

I personally do not regard CMS developers as programmers, since a high school student can publish a website in a few hours after watching a few tutorial videos. Unfortunately, the majority of the websites developed via CMS are done by people who have a little (if any) background in programming. The websites built by CMS do not come with pre-built security protection options, nor do novice developers can protect your CMS website against the common spammer, "Spider," and/or hacker attacks. I have seen many CMS websites and login systems with no password encryptions for their users. It means that if someone accesses their database, all of the user accounts will be compromised. In fact, recent studies have shown that people have a tendency to use one username and password for all of their online accounts.

V. Poor E-Commerce Support

Due to a lack of customizations and poor securities, it is not advisable to utilize CMS for your e-commerce and business transactions. Also, all of the e-commerce built-in plug-ins come with lots of unnecessary tools and poor database designs, both of which can impede your business productivity down the road.

VI. High Switching Costs

Most of the business owners do not know what is going to happen if one day they decided to migrate from a CMS website to a new one. Here are four things you will experience:

1. High cost of expert staffs for moving CMS contents to the new sites.

2. Website disorientations especially for the dynamic CMS pages.

3. SEO disorientations since most of the CMS-based indexed pages will no longer be available in search results.

4. Database nightmare as CMS databases are not normalized for scalability.

VII. Lack of Control

Building your website through CMS is to live at the mercy of lots of plug-ins and libraries in which you have no control. There are three consequences behind this:

1. As always, you get what you paid for, as though some paid CMS themes or plug-ins providers would poorly (up to three weeks) respond to your support requests without any liability for your business losses.

2. To keep your website up and running, you need to follow other third-parties developers even for minor patches or updates which can be very labor-intensive.

3. Sometimes one library depends on other sub-plug-ins or external sources to perform properly which is simply a nightmare for maintenance teams.

VIII. Why PHP And Not HTML

I have hard time understanding why a basic five page website for an accountant or an attorney needs to be done in CMS using PHP rather than the lovely HTML programming language. An HTML website has four advantages over a PHP one:

1. Ease of maintenances

2. Low cost of maintenances relative to PHP.

3. Ease of migration from one server to another

4. Faster server response times and better customer experiences.

IX. Mobile App Are Coming

Not only do most CMS developers not have experience in mobile App developments, but also do they barely know how to integrate a website with a mobile. Since the CMS is just catching up for patches for web-mobile integrations, it is better to consider this factor too.

You might wonder why the CMS is very popular and more websites adopt it on a daily basis in spite of all of the mentioned disadvantages. It stems from three reasons:

1. They are followers and follow what the others are doing without any foresights

2. They usually have tight budgets, like entrepreneurs or start-ups

3. They are not aware of discussed disadvantages.

No matter what has driven your business to a CMS-based website, it is never late to mend your online business model and strategy to streamline both website viewers and Smartphone holder experiences. I hope these discussed factors will shed enough lights on the main cons of CMS and guide you through a right decision.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?WordPress,-Joomla,-Drupal-or-Custom-Website&id=7754343