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Ask HN: What info do you web scrape for?

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101–110 of 115 posts

Re: Ask HN: What info do you web scrape for?

#101
Frankly I'm annoyed to see this topic here. Most people who have taken to scraping are low-life scum. They see content that others have spent months or years producing, simply set up a site that aggregates all of that information, and then sit back and collect revenue from ads or reseller links you paste everywhere.

People who put in a few hours of work to take advantage of other people's hard work piss me off. :/

Re: Ask HN: What info do you web scrape for?

#102
In terms of ideas, how to scrape Javascript-heavy sites. This one has broken me and the Import.io helpdesk: http://www.usrentacar.co.uk/. I'm now trying in CasperJS/PhantomJS but no joy there either.

I'm looking to buy a house, and not all local estate agents post to Rightmove (or some post with a 24-hour delay). Trying to submit the search form on the agent's own hideous website, parse the results and get a standard structure between them all is hideous - I gave up in the end.

Once I have the data the challenge is then analysing it (geolocation, how long are the commute times, distance to amenities etc) which is its own separate challenge

Re: Ask HN: What info do you web scrape for?

#103
I scraped around hundreds of the major universities of US for one of my client. And he used the data to build a mobile platform for students which integrated different services. I mainly grabbed course, class routines, bus route and email of both professors and students. I still have around one and half million of email address of academics.

I also did some e-commerce information scraping.

One of the most interesting one was for a data selling company. They asked me to collect data of geo information, disaster, finance, tweets etc. We used to apply ML and statistics to give forecast with historic data.

Re: Ask HN: What info do you web scrape for?

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

@allegory could you share the the script with us ?

Would love to but not at the minute because it has hard coded credentials for eBay API in it. It's on my list as a TODO to tidy it up. Will stuff on github and post a Show HN on it soon :) I've got one that monitors amazon prices for sudden lows as well.

I'll second a want for this script, let us know when it's up!

Re: Ask HN: What info do you web scrape for?

#105
post #11

I scrape about 60 blogs and news sites that deal with a niche topic and examine all the hyperlinks. If more than one of them links to the same page, I assume that it's a page that's generating some buzz, so I send it out in an email. It's proved to be a generally reliable assumption.

Have you thought about the case in which a blogger might be using a URL shortener? You might be missing some potentially 'buzzy' links if you are just looking at the direct URL string

Re: Ask HN: What info do you web scrape for?

#106
post #92
post #51

I just started getting into scaping (mostly been using import.io) mostly because it is a complement to what I really care about - data visualization. I've gotten a ton of interest for my side project and despite that I haven't opened the beta I'm still worried that it won't be as lucrative as creating some niche reporting services for various verticals (real estate, auto, etc). Essentially data that is very tabular a…

Machete.io is awesome!

Thanks!

Re: Ask HN: What info do you web scrape for?

#108

I've had three primary uses of web scraping. The hard part for me has never been speed. Getting the results structured is somewhere between easy and hideously complicated. 1. Reformatting and content archival (lag times of hours to days are no prob). As an example, I put together a site to archive comments of a ridiculously prolific commenter on a site I follow. I needed the content of his comments, as well as the tr…

>For a lot of business domains, being able to scrape data in a structured way from PDFs would be killer

Can you mention some of those domains? I'm interested. I had worked on one such project earlier, for a financial startup.

Re: Ask HN: What info do you web scrape for?

#109
My first scraping project was well over 10 years ago in college. I was a member of the education club and we wanted to get funding so I convinced the college of education to allow us to charge $10 automatically to students in their school. But then the administration dragged their feet to give us a list to submit to the accounting office for billing. 1 (of the many professors) submitted a list to me via outlook that they copied off the site so I was able to look at the HTML structure of their list. The university used basic security (htaccess) and didn't verify that you had permission for a task once you were in. I had access because I worked for the dean of men. So I scraped all the faculties student lists and then used another system behind the htaccess point to get all the relevant information on each student. Compiled a list of 300 students and submitted it getting the club $3,000 in funding. The college of ed office staff were freaked because they had no clue how I came up with the student roster (no one in their office gave it to me) but nothing came of it.

Been scraping a lot lately but mostly:

- government website for license holders

- creating lists of businesses for different segments (market research/analysis)

- using those lists to scrape individual sites and make analysis (how many use facebook/youtube/etc)

Re: Ask HN: What info do you web scrape for?

#110
post #99

I am looking for data having list of all universities and associated colleges . I didn't found anything related to it anywhere

So like the dmoz.org or higher education?

Yes, sort of like that only. I found a good list on http://www.4icu.org/ , and wikipedia too have list of many colleges and universities.

But information about all colleges associated with university is generally available only on specific site of university, and many times those are in pdf.

Having said that, my above requirement(college associated with university) itself is secondary. I found the list of universities at many places , but not the list of colleges.

So for now just getting a list of all college with location is enough for me.

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