Top 5 web scraping tools you should know in 2022
Tags: webdev
Published: 2022-02-14 10:00:36

In this article, I’ll discuss what is web scraping, How do web scraping works, explain how we can use it legally, and list five of the best tools including Newsdata.io [news API](https://newsdata.io/) to extract news data without any coding, by simply searching and downloading the data in CSV, XLSX, and JSON format.

## What is web scraping?

Web scraping is an automated method of obtaining large amounts of data from websites. Most of this data is unstructured data in HTML format, which is then converted into structured data in a spreadsheet or database so that it can be used in various applications. there are many ways to perform web scraping to get data from websites.

These include using online services, special APIs, or even creating code for web scraping from scratch. Many large websites, such as Google, Twitter, Facebook, StackOverflow, etc. have APIs that allow you to access your data in a structured format.

This is the best option, but there are other sites that do not allow users to access large amounts of data in a structured form or are simply not technologically advanced. In this situation, it is best to use tape scraping to scrape the website for the data.

This is the best option, but there are other sites that do not allow users to access large amounts of data in a structured format or are simply not technologically advanced enough. In that case, it’s best to scrape the website for data using Web Scraping.

Web scraping necessitates the use of two components: the crawler and the scraper. The crawler is an artificial intelligence algorithm that searches the web for specific data by following links across the internet.

A scraper, on the other hand, is a tool designed to extract data from a website. The scraper’s design can vary greatly depending on the complexity and scope of the project in order to extract data quickly and accurately.

## How does web scraping work?

Web scrapers can extract all of the data on a specific site or the data that a user desires. Ideally, you should specify the data you want so that the web scraper extracts only that data quickly.
For example, you may want to scrape an Amazon page for the different types of juicers available, but you may only want information about the models of different juicers and not customer reviews.

When a web scraper needs to scrape a site, the URLs are provided first. The scraper then loads all of the HTML code for those sites, and a more advanced scraper may even extract all of the CSS and Javascript elements.

The scraper then extracts the necessary data from the HTML code and outputs it in the format specified by the user. The data is typically saved in the form of an Excel spreadsheet or a CSV file, but it can also be saved in other formats, such as a JSON file.

## Some applications of web scraping

Web scraping has a wide range of applications and does not require repetitive typing or copy-pasting. It can be used in an infinite number of scenarios. Marketers, for example, use it to improve the efficiency of their processes.

**1. News monitoring**

News Monitoring and analysis are becoming increasingly popular as the volume of online daily produced information grows. It can save you time and help you track topics of interest with pinpoint accuracy and timing. Newsdata.io is a great tool to search, fetch and download the news data in JSON, CSV, XLSX format and analyze the data for valuable insights.

**2. Tracking prices**

You can monitor your competitors’ prices and optimize your price strategy by collecting information about products and their prices on Amazon and other platforms.

**3. Market and competitive intelligence**

Gathering and analyzing data can help you make an accurate and confident decision if you’re actively looking to enter a new market and want to determine your opportunity.

**4. Social listening**

Some social media listening and tracking platforms include Talkwalker, HootSuite, and Brandwatch.

**5. Machine learning (ML)**

While ML and AI are used to improve the performance of data scraping tools, the other half of the web scraping-ML relationship is also true.

The web is an important data source for machine learning algorithms. You can feed your machine learning model by extracting public data at scale.

**6. Website transitions**

It is not uncommon for businesses to migrate their websites to more modern environments. Companies with large outdated websites that contain a lot of critical information (e.g., government websites) may want to use a web scraper to quickly and easily export data from their legacy websites onto their new platforms in this case.

News sites, websites, review sites, blogs, and social networks are all sources of news monitoring.

**7. Analyzing the performance of your content**

If you’re a blogger or content creator, you can use a web scraper to export data about your posts, videos, tweets, and so on into a spreadsheet by following the steps outlined in the video above.
It is more useful to have your data in a table format than to simply view it in the browser view.

## Top 5 web scraping tools

Here is the list of the 5 best web scraping tools you can use to scrap news data from news websites.

**1. Newsdata.io news API**

**Newsdata.io** is a JSON-based [news API](https://newsdata.io/) that scraps news data from 3000+ reliable news websites in 30+ languages and more than 7 categories. Newsdata.io offers a news search feature, with that you can simply search for news data through keywords, and with advanced search filters you can filter out the unwanted data, to get useful news data, and you can download the data in CSV and XLSX format.

Key features:
- Extract news data from over 3000 trusted news sources worldwide with our news API.
- Track and analyze large volumes of news data related to your organization and uncover valuable insights with our news API.
- Extract valuable news data in an Excel, CSV, and JSON file along with analytical insights in a PDF report with our news API.
- Get free access to NewsData.io API to develop and test personal projects with our news API.

**2. Octoparse**

Octoparse is an easy-to-use tool for retrieving web data for programmers and non-programmers. It offers a free plan and a trial version for a paid subscription.

Key Features:
- Manage all websites: with infinite scroll, pagination,
- login, drop-down menu, AJAX, etc.
- Access to extracted data via Excel, CSV, JSON, API or save to database.
- Cloud Service — Scrape and access data on Octparse’s cloud platform.

**3. ScrapingBee**

The ScrapingBee API handles headless browsers and spins proxies. It also has a dedicated Google search scraping API.

Key Features:
- JS Rendering
- Automatic Proxy Rotation
- Can be used directly on Google Sheets and with Chrome web browser.
- Support Google search scraping.

**4. ScrapingBot**

ScrapingBot provides APIs tailored to different scraping needs: an API for scraping raw HTML from a page, an API specialized in scraping retail websites, and an API for scraping property listings from real estate websites.

Key Features:
- Render JS (Headless Chrome).
- High-quality proxy.
- Full-page HTML.
- Up to 20 simultaneous requests.

**5. Scrapestack**

Scrapestack is a REST API for real-time web scraping. Delete web pages in milliseconds, managing millions of proxy IPs, browsers and CAPTCHAs.

Key Features:
- Allows concurrent API requests.
- Supports CAPTCHA solving and JS rendering.
- HTTPS encryption.
- 100+ geolocations.

## Final thoughts

Data scraping has a wide range of applications that go beyond simply moving data from one location to another.

Whether you’re a software developer, a data scientist, a machine learning enthusiast, a marketer, or a startup, leveraging this practice can help you gain intelligence and efficiency while also boosting your business.