Do you need to extract info from the internet? Use these alternative data scraping APIs for your organization.
Web scraping is a method for extracting huge volumes of data from websites for several purposes. To clarify, manually copying data from many sources for retrieval in a single location, might be time-consuming and tiresome. With a web scraping tool, you will be able to largely automate this operation. The main tasks for which web scraping is used include pricing monitoring, financial data aggregation, consumer activity monitoring, and news tracking.
The objective of an application programming interface (API) is to allow various systems, applications, and devices to share data. APIs enable a system to give back the correct response by converting a user’s input into data. Certainly, an API lets a developer make a specific “call” or “request” to send or receive information. This communication is done using a programming language called “JSON.” Moreover, companies also use APIs for making a defined action such as updating or deleting data. There are usually four basic requests that an API can make, these are:
- Gather information (Pulling all coupon codes)
- Update pieces of data (Updating prices)
- Create (Creating a new product category)
- Delete (Deleting a blog post)
Furthermore, you must be able to select the better web scraping platforms that the market has to offer. Each tool presents different prices and features that may not be needed for your business. In this article, we will analyze three alternative data scraping APIs you could use for your organization.
1. Codery
The Codery API crawls a website and extracts all of its structured data. You only need to provide the URL and they will take care of the rest. In the form of an auto-filling spreadsheet, extract specific data from any webpage. Moreover, this API has millions of reliable proxies available to acquire information required without fear of being blocked.
Using Codery, with a single request, the scale search engine crawls pages. To manage all types of websites, use a real browser to scrape and handle all of the javascript that runs on the page. Finally, Codery has a variety of prices, with blocking Images and CSS from websites included.
2. Page2API
Page2API is a versatile API that offers you a variety of facilities and features. Firstly, you can scrape web pages and convert HTML into a well-organized JSON structure. Moreover, you can launch long-running scraping sessions in the background and receive the obtained data via a webhook (callback URL).
Page2API presents a custom scenario, where you can build a set of instructions that will wait for specific elements, execute javascript, handle pagination, and much more. For hard-to-scrape websites, they offer the possibility to use Premium (Residential) Proxies, located in 138 countries around the world.
3. Scraper API
Scraper API is the third web scraping tool we will analyze. It supports browsers, proxies, and CAPTCHAs, allowing you to get raw HTML from any website with a single API call.
Scraper API’s main features include the ability to render Javascript, ease of integration, and geolocated Rotating Proxies. Finally, to construct scalable web scrapers, you’ll need a lot of speed and reliability.
Also published on Medium.