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Web Scraper Chrome Extension
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This post is about DIY web scraping tools. If you are looking for a fully customizable web scraping solution, you can add your project to CrawlBoard.

How to Use Web Scraper Chrome Extension to Extract Data

Web scraping is becoming a vital ingredient in business and marketing planning regardless of the industry. There are several ways to crawl the web for useful data depending on your requirements and budget. Did you know that your favorite web browser could also act as a great web scraping tool?

You can install the Web Scraper extension from the chrome web store to make it an easy-to-use data scraping tool. The best part is, that you can stay in the comfort zone of your browser while the scraping happens. This doesn’t demand many technical skills, which makes it a good option when you need to do some quick data scraping. Let’s get started with the tutorial on how to use the web scraper chrome extension to extract data.

About the Web Scraper Chrome Extension

Web Scraper is a web data extractor extension for chrome browsers made exclusively for web data scraping. You can set up a plan (sitemap) on how to navigate a website and specify the data to be extracted. The scraper will traverse the website according to the setup and extract the relevant data. It lets you export the extracted data to CSV. Multiple pages can be scraped using the tool, making it even more powerful. It can even extract data from dynamic pages that use Javascript and Ajax.

What You Need

  • Google Chrome browser
  • A working internet connection

A. Installation and setup

Once this is done, you are ready to start scraping any website using your chrome browser. You just need to learn how to perform the scraping, which we are about to explain.

B. The Method

After installation, open the Google Chrome developer tools by pressing F12. (You can alternatively right-click on the screen and select inspect element). In the developer tools, you will find a new tab named ‘Web scraper’ as shown in the screenshot below.

Extract Data using Web Scraper Chrome Extension

Now let’s see how to use this on a live web page. We will use a site called www.awesomegifs.com for this tutorial. This site contains gif images and we will crawl these image URLs using our web scraper.

Step 1: Creating a Sitemap

  • Go to https://www.awesomegifs.com/
  • Open developer tools by right-clicking anywhere on the screen and then selecting inspect
  • Click on the web scraper tab in developer tools
  • Click on ‘create new sitemap’ and then select ‘create sitemap’
  • Give the sitemap a name and enter the URL of the site in the start URL field.
  • Click on ‘Create Sitemap’

To crawl multiple pages from a website, we need to understand the pagination structure of that site. You can easily do that by clicking the ‘Next’ button a few times from the homepage. Doing this on Awesomegifs.com revealed that the pages are structured as https://awesomegifs.com/page/1/, https://awesomegifs.com/page/2/, and so on. To switch to a different page, you only have to change the number at the end of this URL. Now, we need the scraper to do this automatically.

To do this, create a new sitemap with the start URL as https://awesomegifs.com/page/[001-125]. The scraper will now open the URL repeatedly while incrementing the final value each time. This means the scraper will open pages starting from 1 to 125 and crawl the elements that we require from each page.

Step 2: Scraping Elements

Every time the scraper opens a page from the site, we need to extract some elements. In this case, it’s the gif image URLs. First, you have to find the CSS selector matching the images. You can find the CSS selector by looking at the source file of the web page (CTRL+U). An easier way is to use the selector tool to click and select any element on the screen. Click on the Sitemap that you just created, and click on ‘Add new selector’.

In the selector id field, give the selector a name. In the type field, you can select the type of data that you want to be extracted. Click on the select button and select any element on the web page that you want to be extracted. When you are done selecting, click on ‘Done selecting’. It’s easy as clicking on an icon with the mouse. You can check the ‘multiple’ checkbox to indicate that the element you want can be present multiple times on the page and that you want each instance of it to be scrapped.

Web Scraper Chrome Extension to Extract Data

Now you can save the selector if everything looks good. To start the scraping process, just click on the sitemap tab and select ‘Scrape’. A new window will pop up which will visit each page in the loop and crawl the required data. If you want to stop the data scraping process in between, just close this window and you will have the data that was extracted till then.

Using Web Scraper Chrome Extension

Once you stop scraping, go to the sitemap tab to browse the extracted data or export it to a CSV file. The only downside of such data extraction software is that you have to manually perform the scraping every time since it doesn’t have many automation features built in.

If you want to crawl data on a large scale, it is better to go with a data scraping service instead of such free web scraper chrome extension data extraction tools like these. In the second part of this series, we will show you how to make a MySQL database using the extracted data. Stay tuned for that!

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

How does the Web Scraper Chrome Extension handle pagination on websites that dynamically load more content as the user scrolls?

The Web Scraper Chrome Extension addresses pagination on websites with dynamic content loading, such as infinite scrolling, by allowing users to create selectors that simulate the action of scrolling or navigating through pagination links. This functionality enables the extension to interact with the website as a user would, ensuring that all content, even that which loads dynamically as the user scrolls, can be captured and extracted.

Can the Web Scraper Chrome Extension be used to scrape data from websites that require user login before accessing certain content?

For websites requiring user login, the Web Scraper Chrome Extension offers a workaround by allowing the user to manually navigate to the website and log in through their browser before initiating the scraping process. Once logged in, the extension can access and scrape data from pages that require authentication. However, users must ensure they have the necessary permissions to scrape data from these secured areas to comply with the website’s terms of service and legal considerations.

What are the limitations of the Web Scraper Chrome Extension in terms of the volume of data it can efficiently handle without performance issues?

Regarding performance and data volume limitations, the Web Scraper Chrome Extension is designed to efficiently handle a considerable amount of data. However, the performance might be impacted as the volume of data increases or when scraping very complex websites. The extension runs in the browser and relies on the user’s computer resources, which means that very large scraping tasks could slow down the browser or lead to memory issues. For extensive scraping needs, it might be beneficial to consider server-based scraping solutions that are designed to handle large volumes of data more robustly.

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