Technology
Train a robot to scrape websites in two minutes, without any coding
Web scraping is the process where computer bots are used to automatically extract content from a website. This process extracts the underlying HTML code and the data stored in the database. After the data is collected, its content can be replicated elsewhere. This procedure is used by many digital businesses for data harvesting and can help analyze a website’s content and rank it, compare prices and product descriptions across different websites, and sentiment analysis from forums and social media.
Web scraping tools are software programs designed to go through databases and extract information. Some main differences help distinguish between legitimate and malicious bots. For example, legitimate bots abide by a website’s robot.txt file which lists pages that are permitted to be accessed and those which are not, and legitimate bots are also identified with the organization for which they scrape.
Designing and creating a web scraping robot can be a challenging task, even more, if you have little to no coding knowledge. So, if you want to train a quality robot that will scrape websites for you, and without any coding needed, then take a look at the following tool.
Browse AI is a tool that provides the possibility to train a robot for web scraping in just two minutes. This is a no-code, cloud-based automation software that helps you extract and monitor structured data from any website. You can train a robot to interact with websites and extract data by simply recording your actions. Also, this tool automatically detects data patterns on a page, from which you can select and label the information you need. It can also adapt to any website changes while running in the background, and by generating hundreds of selectors for each element.
Based on the implementation, this tool gives you access to live data with automatic updates when you configure a robot to monitor the extracted data for changes. On top of this, you can set up email alerts if any changes to data are detected. One robot can be trained to extract all links and the other to extract their information. This way you can extract a list of items and their detail pages. These robots are powerful enough to run up to 1000 tasks at a time, and bulk runs can be executed by uploading CSV with all input parameters or by using Zapier or Pabbly Connect integrations. For those with some coding knowledge, you can try using the bulk run API endpoint for executing these runs.
Another great feature of this tool is the possibility to turn any website into an API and run tasks manually or by scheduling them. These REST API and webhook integrations make it possible to automate almost any programming feature. The collected data can be easily extracted to be used with other tools or CRMs. Additionally, native integrations for Google Sheets and Airtable are offered.
On top of all these functionalities, there are prebuilt robots you can use out-of-the-box for popular use cases without any additional setup required. Some of the main benefits when using this tool include a fast setup, zero-maintenance policy, geo-location-based data, pagination and scroll handling, flexible pricing, files download, login secured data extraction, user action emulation, no coding required, captcha solving, etc.
When subscribing to this tool, you get lifetime access to Browse AI, all future Starter Plan updates, a 60-day money-back guarantee, etc. It is important to redeem access codes within 60 days of purchase. The tool is also GDPR compliant, and you can stack up to 8 purchase codes. No matter the chosen plan, you receive the following features: apply credits to premium sites, concurrent executions, 1-hour checks, and 40-day retention.
There are three pricing brackets. The first one is the Single plan costing $98 for a one-time purchase and it comes with Starter Plan features, 10 robots, and 2500 credits per month. Next up is the Double plan costing $196 for a one-time purchase with unlimited robots and 5000 credits per month. Finally, the Multiple plans cost $294 for a one-time purchase and come with unlimited robots and 7500 credits per month.
These credits are used when scraping websites. For example, each extracted record costs 1 credit, with premium sites costing additional 20 credits for each task execution. Note that these prices are a part of a promotion at the time of writing the article and that prices may vary depending on when you are reading this post.
There you have it, one of the most popular and easiest to set up and use robot builders on the market. Browse AI is the first option that comes to mind when thinking about web scraping and automation. With its powerful functionalities, it will not let you down whenever you use it.