We are proud to announce the official release of our Chrome Extension for Scraping Data. This Extension allows you to quickly and easily gather data from any website without leaving your current page.
This new tool will serve as the backbone of our data processing pipeline, allowing us to efficiently collect and integrate a wide variety of information. While we are most excited about its use in our business, we hope that it can also be used by anyone in need of this sort of functionality.
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Chrome Extension For Scraping Data
The importance of web scraping cannot be overemphasized – within a few hours; you can convert a whole website with hundreds of thousands of pages into structured data that you need for your businesses or research thorough automated means.
Web scrapers as the tool that makes web scraping possible, and there are many web scrapers you can get in the market. Some are paid while others are free. In terms of platform support, we can say that Chrome is one of the most popular platforms that get the attention of developers of web scrapers, and a good number of web scrapers have been developed for the Chrome platform as extensions.
Chrome is the most popular web browser in the market right now, and the Chrome Web Store is host to over 180,000 extensions with web scrapers being part of them. While a good number of them in the Chrome Web Store are free, it does not mean all of them are worthy of being used for any serious web scraping problem. It is because of this that this article has been written – to provide you recommendations on the best web scrapers available in the Chrome Web Store.
Why Use Web Scrapers Available as Chrome Extensions?
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There was a time that developers do not see Chrome extensions as software to be taken seriously. That time is long gone as more and more users of Chrome find extension helpful. Now, full-blown softwares are available as Chrome extensions and web scrapers are some of them. But why should you use them? They are lightweight, easy to develop, and as such, they are usually cheap, while some are even free. This then means that they are cost-effective compared to others developed as cloud-based platforms and installable apps on PCs. They are also cross-platform.
Top 5 Web Scraper Chrome Extensions
Make no mistake about it; web scraping can only be easy, fast, and stress-free only if you use the best web scrapers for your web scraping projects. Unfortunately, we have come to realize that a good number of web scrapers in the market are living on hypes, and as such, it is important we clear the air to prevent you from making the mistake of choosing the wrong tool for the job. Below are the 5 best web scrapers available as Chrome extensions that we have tried, and they prove to work quite well.
WebScraper.io Extension
webscraper io
Pricing: Free
Free Trials: Chrome version is completely free
Data Output Format: CSV
Webscraper.io is a web scraping tool provider with a Chrome browser extension and a Firefox add-on. The webScraper.io Chrome extension is one of the best web scrapers you can install as a Chrome extension. With over 300,000 downloads – and impressive customer reviews in the store, this extension is a must-have for web scrapers. With this tool, you can extract data from any website of your choice in an easy and swift manner. It requests no coding skills but presents a point and click interface for training the tool on the data to be extracted. Its only dependency is having a Chrome browser installed on your computer.
webscraper overview
Data Miner.io Data Scraper
Data Miner
Pricing: Starts at $19.99 per month
Free Trials: 500 pages per month
Data Output Format: CSV, Excel
Data Miner Chrome extension remains free for you provided you wouldn’t be scraping more than 500 pages in a month -anything more than that, and you will have to opt-inn for their paid plans. Data Miner extension requires no coding to use, and it is perfectly made for absolute beginners as it requires just clicks to scrape. Currently, this extension is available for 15,000+ website. It is important you know that Data Miner does not behave like a bot as a regular user, and as such, you do not have to worry about blocks. Data Miner automates form filling, scrapes tables with just a click, and automatically go from page to page when pagination is detected.
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Scraper
Scraper
Pricing: Completely free
Free Trials: Free
Data Output Format: CSV, Excel TXT
Scraper is fairly unpopular when compared with the two web scrapers discussed above – it does not even have a website of its own. However, it works quite great and can extract data out of web pages and convert them into spreadsheets. This web scraper is quite simple but comes with some limitations and is free to use. The major problem associated with Scraper is that it is not beginner-friendly. The usage of Scraper requires someone to be comfortable working with XPath, and as such, it is wise to say it is for intermediate and advanced users.
Hunter.io
hunter.io
Pricing: Starts at $49 per month
Free Trials: 50 requests monthly
Data Output Format: TXT, CSV, Excel
Hunter.io is a web scraping tool available as a Chrome extension. Unlike the others described above, Hunter.io web scraping tools are very much specialized and tailored towards crawling web pages in search of email addresses. With Hunter.io, you can find the email address of any professional or even scrape all the email addresses associated with a specific domain name. It also has an email verifier that you can use to verify the deliverability of any email address. Interestingly, over 2 million professionals are making use of this tool.
hunter.io overview
Read more: Email Scraping Tools: Web email scraping services and Software (Email Extractor)
Agenty Scraping Agent
agenty
Pricing: Free
Free Trials: 14 days free trial – 100 pages credit
Data Output Format: Google spreadsheet, CSV, Excel
The Agenty Scraping Agent is not a free tool and requires you to make a monetary commitment – but has a free trial option for a test. The Agenty Scraping Agent can be installed as a Chrome extension. It presents a point and click interface for training the agent on the data required. It facilitates anonymous web scraping through the use of highly anonymous proxies and automatic IP rotation. It supports batch URL crawling and even crawls websites that require a login and JavaScript-heavy websites. It keeps a history of your crawling activities and can be integrated with a good number of tools, including Google Spreadsheet, Amazon S3, and Webhook.
Conclusion
Looking at the list above, you can see that developers are already taking Chrome as a serious platform, and we expect more web scrapers to join this list. Web scrapers available as Chrome extensions are light, easy to use, and comes with free plans perfect for small web scraping projects. They are also cross-platform and works in a browser environment, which makes them perfect for web scraping.
How to scrape data with Chrome extensions
When it comes to data scraping, there are plenty of solutions that can give you the kind of results you are looking for. One that is quite often overlooked, however, is simply leveraging your browser.
Here, we will take a look at how you can utilise Chrome’s extension functionalities to scrape data of any website.
Why would you want to do this?
The main reason why someone would opt for using a Chrome extensions for web scraping is a limited budget. Of course, you may have a multitude of other reasons too. It’s a great option for those who:
● Are inexperienced in data scraping and would like to get a taste before investing further.
● Would like a simple, no-frills scraping tool without having to spend time and effort in software that can be very technical.
● Have no need for fully-fledged data scraping as their needs can be met with something much simpler instead.
● Need to figure out whether or not data scraping fits their own business model and how they can integrate it further.
For these and many other reasons, utilising an extension can be an excellent introduction to data scraping and may even serve as a complete package for many.
Start by doing your research
As is usually the case with DIY tech solutions, there is no single option that can fulfill your every requirement. As you might expect, there are plenty of data scraping extensions that vary in functionality, usability, and result output.
One of the things that’s common in many of these extensions is the fact that they assume a basic working knowledge of HTML and CSS.
That is because they mainly use HTML and CSS selectors to understand and scrape the data that you want and may need you to be able to customise their selections to suit your needs.
Some examples of good scraping tools (in no particular order):
● Agenty
● Web Scraper
● Data Scraper
How do these data scrapers work?
While this will often depend on the exact extension you choose, they all share common features as they utilise the same kind of web-based features to extract data.
To begin with, you will need to install the extension from the Chrome Web Store. After that, you should see a new icon in the top-right hand corner of Chrome.
Click on that button and you will see the extension’s working interface. Some extensions, like Web Scraper, integrate directly in Chrome’s Developer Tools which can be easily found by pressing Ctrl + Shift + I or just by hitting the F12 button.
Once you can see the user interface, you are almost ready to go. Like all other similar software, Chrome-based data scrapers operate on a click-to-scrape function so that you can quickly gather required data.
The most common output file is CSV which you can then open via any compatible software such as Microsoft Excel or Google’s own Sheets so you never have to leave your browser.
Data scraping has never been easier
After trying your first data scraping extension, you will quickly come to realise that you don’t always need complicated tools to extract data from websites.
In a time where knowing your competition and understanding big data has never been more important, we are lucky enough that these processes have never been easier either.
Conclusion
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