Selenium IDE and Web Scraping

Selenium is a browser automation framework that includes IDE, Remote Control server and bindings of various flavors including Java, .Net, Ruby, Python and other. In this post we touch on the basic structure of the framework and its application to  Web Scraping.
What is Selenium IDE


Selenium IDE is an integrated development environment for Selenium scripts. It is implemented as a Firefox plugin, and it allows recording browsers’ interactions in order to edit them. This works well for software tests, composing and debugging. The Selenium Remote Control is a server specific for a particular environment; it causes custom scripts to be implemented for controlled browsers. Selenium deploys on Windows, Linux, and iOS. How various Selenium components are supported with major browsers read here.
What does Selenium do and Web Scraping

Basically Selenium automates browsers. This ability is no doubt to be applied to web scraping. Since browsers (and Selenium) support JavaScript, jQuery and other methods working with dynamic content why not use this mix for benefit in web scraping, rather than to try to catch Ajax events with plain code? The second reason for this kind of scrape automation is browser-fasion data access (though today this is emulated with most libraries).

Yes, Selenium works to automate browsers, but how to control Selenium from a custom script to automate a browser for web scraping? There are Selenium PHP and other language libraries (bindings) providing for scripts to call and use Selenium. It is possible to write Selenium clients (using the libraries) in almost any language we prefer, for example Perl, Python, Java, PHP etc. Those libraries (API), along with a server, the Java written server that invokes browsers for actions, constitute the Selenum RC (Remote Control). Remote Control automatically loads the Selenium Core into the browser to control it. For more details in Selenium components refer to here.



A tough scrape task for programmer

“…cURL is good, but it is very basic.  I need to handle everything manually; I am creating HTTP requests by hand.
This gets difficult – I need to do a lot of work to make sure that the requests that I send are exactly the same as the requests that a browser would
send, both for my sake and for the website’s sake. (For my sake
because I want to get the right data, and for the website’s sake
because I don’t want to cause error messages or other problems on their site because I sent a bad request that messed with their web application).  And if there is any important javascript, I need to imitate it with PHP.
It would be a great benefit to me to be able to control a browser like Firefox with my code. It would solve all my problems regarding the emulation of a real browser…
it seems that Selenium will allow me to do this…” -Ryan S

Yes, that’s what we will consider below.
Scrape with Selenium

In order to create scripts that interact with the Selenium Server (Selenium RC, Selenium Remote Webdriver) or create local Selenium WebDriver script, there is the need to make use of language-specific client drivers (also called Formatters, they are included in the selenium-ide-1.10.0.xpi package). The Selenium servers, drivers and bindings are available at Selenium download page.
The basic recipe for scrape with Selenium:

    Use Chrome or Firefox browsers
    Get Firebug or Chrome Dev Tools (Cntl+Shift+I) in action.
    Install requirements (Remote control or WebDriver, libraries and other)
    Selenium IDE : Record a ‘test’ run thru a site, adding some assertions.
    Export as a Python (other language) script.
    Edit it (loops, data extraction, db input/output)
    Run script for the Remote Control

The short intro Slides for the scraping of tough websites with Python & Selenium are here (as Google Docs slides) and here (Slide Share).
Selenium components for Firefox installation guide

For how to install the Selenium IDE to Firefox see  here starting at slide 21. The Selenium Core and Remote Control installation instructions are there too.
Extracting for dynamic content using jQuery/JavaScript with Selenium

One programmer is doing a similar thing …

1. launch a selenium RC (remote control) server
2. load a page
3. inject the jQuery script
4. select the interested contents using jQuery/JavaScript
5. send back to the PHP client using JSON.

He particularly finds it quite easy and convenient to use jQuery for
screen scraping, rather than using PHP/XPath.
Conclusion

The Selenium IDE is the popular tool for browser automation, mostly for its software testing application, yet also in that Web Scraping techniques for tough dynamic websites may be implemented with IDE along with the Selenium Remote Control server. These are the basic steps for it:

    Record the ‘test‘ browser behavior in IDE and export it as the custom programming language script
    Formatted language script runs on the Remote Control server that forces browser to send HTTP requests and then script catches the Ajax powered responses to extract content.

Selenium based Web Scraping is an easy task for small scale projects, but it consumes a lot of memory resources, since for each request it will launch a new browser instance.



Source: http://extract-web-data.com/selenium-ide-and-web-scraping/

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

Advantages of Outsourcing Data Conversion Services

Data conversion is the process of converting data from one format to another. In this era of IT revolution, data conversion services is a vital tool in getting information on finger tips. It has acquired a unique place in this internet driven, fast growing business world.

It gives handiness and security to business organizations in managing, updating and retrieving data. This services help firms to convert their precious data and gather papers into digital format for long-term storage. The data can be stored for the purpose of archiving, easy searching, accessing and sharing.

More and more highly experienced BPO companies are coming into this market providing full range of reliable and trustworthy data conversion services to their clients worldwide. These BPO companies are fully prepared with excellent infrastructure and skilled manpower as per clients' expectations and specifications.

Some of the data conversion services which are available in market are as follows:

    Document conversion
    HTML conversion
    XML conversion
    SGML conversion
    CAD conversion
    Image Conversion
    Book conversion
    PDF conversion
    Catalog conversion
    MS Excel conversion
    Indexing
    OCR / ICR Clean up, OMR

It is a process of changing bits from one format to another in order to get relative interoperability or ability to use new features. By outsourcing  this services companies can minimize the risk, cut down costs and thereby focus on their core issues. Offshore BPO companies are consistent, simple and one stop solution provider.

Advantages of outsourcing data conversion services:

    Focus on core business activities
    Avoids paper work
    Cuts down operating expenses
    Promotes business as effectively as possible
    Eliminates data redundancy
    Easy accessibility of data at any time
    Systemizes company's data in simpler format

If you are planning to outsource this kind of task to an external service provider, better make sure that the provider is consistent in quality, productivity and customer service operations. Automating any business by conversion services definitely increases the productivity of that company.



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Advantages-of-Outsourcing-Data-Conversion-Services&id=2666931

Why Outsourcing Data Mining Services?

Are huge volumes of raw data waiting to be converted into information that you can use? Your organization's hunt for valuable information ends with valuable data mining, which can help to bring more accuracy and clarity in decision making process.

Nowadays world is information hungry and with Internet offering flexible communication, there is remarkable flow of data. It is significant to make the data available in a readily workable format where it can be of great help to your business. Then filtered data is of considerable use to the organization and efficient this services to increase profits, smooth work flow and ameliorating overall risks.

Data mining is a process that engages sorting through vast amounts of data and seeking out the pertinent information. Most of the instance data mining is conducted by professional, business organizations and financial analysts, although there are many growing fields that are finding the benefits of using in their business.

Data mining is helpful in every decision to make it quick and feasible. The information obtained by it is used for several applications for decision-making relating to direct marketing, e-commerce, customer relationship management, healthcare, scientific tests, telecommunications, financial services and utilities.

Data mining services include:

    Congregation data from websites into excel database
    Searching & collecting contact information from websites
    Using software to extract data from websites
    Extracting and summarizing stories from news sources
    Gathering information about competitors business

In this globalization era, handling your important data is becoming a headache for many business verticals. Then outsourcing is profitable option for your business. Since all projects are customized to suit the exact needs of the customer, huge savings in terms of time, money and infrastructure can be realized.

Advantages of Outsourcing Data Mining Services:

    Skilled and qualified technical staff who are proficient in English
    Improved technology scalability
    Advanced infrastructure resources
    Quick turnaround time
    Cost-effective prices
    Secure Network systems to ensure data safety
    Increased market coverage

Outsourcing will help you to focus on your core business operations and thus improve overall productivity. So data mining outsourcing is become wise choice for business. Outsourcing of this services helps businesses to manage their data effectively, which in turn enable them to achieve higher profits.



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Why-Outsourcing-Data-Mining-Services?&id=3066061

Data Extraction - A Guideline to Use Scrapping Tools Effectively

So many people around the world do not have much knowledge about these scrapping tools. In their views, mining means extracting resources from the earth. In these internet technology days, the new mined resource is data. There are so many data mining software tools are available in the internet to extract specific data from the web. Every company in the world has been dealing with tons of data, managing and converting this data into a useful form is a real hectic work for them. If this right information is not available at the right time a company will lose valuable time to making strategic decisions on this accurate information.

This type of situation will break opportunities in the present competitive market. However, in these situations, the data extraction and data mining tools will help you to take the strategic decisions in right time to reach your goals in this competitive business. There are so many advantages with these tools that you can store customer information in a sequential manner, you can know the operations of your competitors, and also you can figure out your company performance. And it is a critical job to every company to have this information at fingertips when they need this information.

To survive in this competitive business world, this data extraction and data mining are critical in operations of the company. There is a powerful tool called Website scraper used in online digital mining. With this toll, you can filter the data in internet and retrieves the information for specific needs. This scrapping tool is used in various fields and types are numerous. Research, surveillance, and the harvesting of direct marketing leads is just a few ways the website scraper assists professionals in the workplace.

Screen scrapping tool is another tool which useful to extract the data from the web. This is much helpful when you work on the internet to mine data to your local hard disks. It provides a graphical interface allowing you to designate Universal Resource Locator, data elements to be extracted, and scripting logic to traverse pages and work with mined data. You can use this tool as periodical intervals. By using this tool, you can download the database in internet to you spread sheets. The important one in scrapping tools is Data mining software, it will extract the large amount of information from the web, and it will compare that date into a useful format. This tool is used in various sectors of business, especially, for those who are creating leads, budget establishing seeing the competitors charges and analysis the trends in online. With this tool, the information is gathered and immediately uses for your business needs.

Another best scrapping tool is e mailing scrapping tool, this tool crawls the public email addresses from various web sites. You can easily from a large mailing list with this tool. You can use these mailing lists to promote your product through online and proposals sending an offer for related business and many more to do. With this toll, you can find the targeted customers towards your product or potential business parents. This will allows you to expand your business in the online market.

There are so many well established and esteemed organizations are providing these features free of cost as the trial offer to customers. If you want permanent services, you need to pay nominal fees. You can download these services from their valuable web sites also.

Maulik Jyotishi is the owner of scrapping expert website a company which specializes in email extractor and data extraction from web pages.



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Extraction---A-Guideline-to-Use-Scrapping-Tools-Effectively&id=3600918

Business Intelligence Data Mining

Data mining can be technically defined as the automated extraction of hidden information from large databases for predictive analysis. In other words, it is the retrieval of useful information from large masses of data, which is also presented in an analyzed form for specific decision-making.

Data mining requires the use of mathematical algorithms and statistical techniques integrated with software tools. The final product is an easy-to-use software package that can be used even by non-mathematicians to effectively analyze the data they have. Data Mining is used in several applications like market research, consumer behavior, direct marketing, bioinformatics, genetics, text analysis, fraud detection, web site personalization, e-commerce, healthcare, customer relationship management, financial services and telecommunications.

Business intelligence data mining is used in market research, industry research, and for competitor analysis. It has applications in major industries like direct marketing, e-commerce, customer relationship management, healthcare, the oil and gas industry, scientific tests, genetics, telecommunications, financial services and utilities. BI uses various technologies like data mining, scorecarding, data warehouses, text mining, decision support systems, executive information systems, management information systems and geographic information systems for analyzing useful information for business decision making.

Business intelligence is a broader arena of decision-making that uses data mining as one of the tools. In fact, the use of data mining in BI makes the data more relevant in application. There are several kinds of data mining: text mining, web mining, social networks data mining, relational databases, pictorial data mining, audio data mining and video data mining, that are all used in business intelligence applications.

Some data mining tools used in BI are: decision trees, information gain, probability, probability density functions, Gaussians, maximum likelihood estimation, Gaussian Baves classification, cross-validation, neural networks, instance-based learning /case-based/ memory-based/non-parametric, regression algorithms, Bayesian networks, Gaussian mixture models, K-means and hierarchical clustering, Markov models and so on.



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Business-Intelligence-Data-Mining&id=196648

The Need for Specialised Data Mining Techniques for Web 2.0

Web 2.0 is not exactly a new version of the Web, but rather a way to describe a new generation of interactive websites centred on the user. These are websites that offer

interactive information sharing, as well as collaboration - a case in point being wikis and blogs - and is now expanding to other areas as well. These new sites are the result of new technologies and new ideas and are on the cutting edge of Web development. Due to their novelty, they create a rather interesting challenge for data mining.

Data mining is simply a process of finding patterns in masses of data. There is such a vast plethora of information out there on the Web that it is necessary to use data mining tools to make sense of it. Traditional data mining techniques are not very effective when used on these new Web 2.0 sites because the user interface is so varied. Since Web 2.0 sites are created largely by user-supplied content, there is even more data to mine for valuable information. Having said that, the additional freedom in the format ensures that it is much more difficult to sift through the content to find what is usable.The data available is very valuable, so where there is a new platform, there must be new techniques developed for mining the data. The trick is that the data mining methods must themselves be flexible as the sites they are targeting are flexible. In the initial days of the World Wide Web, which was referred to as Web 1.0, data mining programs knew where to look for the desired information. Web 2.0 sites lack structure, meaning there is no single spot for the mining program to target. It must be able to scan and sift through all of the user-generated content to find what is needed. The upside is that there is a lot more data out there, which means more and more accurate results if the data can be properly utilized. The downside is that with all that data, if the selection criteria are not specific enough, the results will be meaningless. Too much of a good thing is definitely a bad thing. Wikis and blogs have been around long enough now that enough research has been carried out to understand them better. This research can now be used, in turn, to devise the best possible data mining methods. New algorithms are being developed that will allow data mining applications to analyse this data and return useful. Another problem is that there are many cul-de-sacs on the internet now, where groups of people share information freely, but only behind walls/barriers that keep it away from the genera results.

The main challenge in developing these algorithms does not lie with finding the data, because there is too much of it. The challenge is filtering out irrelevant data to get to the meaningful one. At this point none of the techniques are perfected. This makes Web 2.0 data mining an exciting and frustrating field, and yet another challenge in the never ending series of technological hurdles that have stemmed from the internet. There are numerous problems to overcome. One is the inability to rely on keywords, which used to be the best method to search. This does not allow for an understanding of context or sentiment associated with the keywords which can drastically vary the meaning of the keyword population. Social networking sites are a good example of this, where you can share information with everyone you know, but it is more difficult for that information to proliferate outside of those circles. This is good in terms of protecting privacy, but it does not add to the collective knowledge base and it can lead to a skewed understanding of public sentiment based on what social structures you have entry into. Attempts to use artificial intelligence have been less than successful because it is not adequately focused in its methodology. Data mining depends on the collection of data and sorting the results to create reports on the individual metrics that are the focus of interest. The size of the data sets are simply too large for traditional computational techniques to be able to tackle them. That is why a new answer needs to be found. Data mining is an important necessity for managing the backhaul of the internet. As Web 2.0 grows exponentially, it is increasingly hard to keep track of everything that is out there and summarize and synthesize it in a useful way. Data mining is necessary for companies to be able to really understand what customers like and want so that they can create products to meet these needs. In the increasingly aggressive global market, companies also need the reports resulting from data mining to remain competitive. If they are unable to keep track of the market and stay abreast of popular trends, they will not survive. The solution has to come from open source with options to scale databases depending on needs. There are companies that are now working on these ideas and are sharing the results with others to further improve them. So, just as open source and collective information sharing of Web 2.0 created these new data mining challenges, it will be the collective effort that solves the problems as well.

It is important to view this as a process of constant improvement, not one where an answer will be absolute for all time. Since its advent, the internet has changed quite significantly as well as the way users interact with it. Data mining will always be a critical part of corporate internet usage and its methods will continue to evolve just as the Web and its content does.

There is a huge incentive for creating better data mining solutions to tackle the complexities of Web 2.0. For this reason, several companies exist just for the purpose of analysing and creating solutions to the data mining problem. They find eager buyers for their applications in companies which are desperate for information on markets and potential customers. The companies in question do not simply want more data, they want better data. This requires a system that can classify and group data, and then make sense of the results.While the data mining process is expensive to start with, it is well worth for a retail company because it provides insight into the market and thus enables quick decisions.The speed at which a company which has insightful information on the marketplace can react to changes, gives it a huge advantage over the competition. Not only can the company react quickly, it is likely to steer itself in the right direction if its information is based on updated data.Advanced data mining will allow companies not only to make snap decisions, but also to plan long range strategies, based on the direction the marketplace is heading. Data mining brings the company closer to its customers. The real winners here, are the companies that have now discovered that they can make a living by improving the existing data mining techniques. They have filled a niche that was only created recently, which no one could have foreseen and have done quite a, good job at it.




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