Web scraping with GPT-4o: powerful but expensive • Hacker News Board

Re: Web scraping with GPT-4o: powerful but expensive

#41

Post by jumploops » Mon, Sep 02, 2024, 11:45 PM UTC

We've had the best success by first converting the HTML to a simpler format (i.e. markdown) before passing it to the LLM.

There are a few ways to do this that we've tried, namely Extractus[0] and dom-to-semantic-markdown[1].

Internally we use Apify[2] and Firecrawl[3] for Magic Loops[4] that run in the cloud, both of which have options for simplifying pages built-in, but for our Chrome Extension we use dom-to-semantic-markdown.

Similar to the article, we're currently exploring a user-assisted flow to generate XPaths for a given site, which we can then use to extract specific elements before hitting the LLM.

By simplifying the "problem" we've had decent success, even with GPT-4o mini.

[0] https://github.com/extractus

[1] https://github.com/romansky/dom-to-semantic-markdown

[2] https://apify.com/

[3] https://www.firecrawl.dev/

[4] https://magicloops.dev/

Re: Web scraping with GPT-4o: powerful but expensive

#42

Post by kurthr » Mon, Sep 02, 2024, 11:46 PM UTC

axg11 wrote: post #39

parhamn wrote: post #31

Is there a "html reducer" out there? I've been considering writing one. If you take a page's source it's going to be 90% garbage tokens -- random JS, ads, unnecessary properties, aggressive nesting for layout rendering, etc. I feel like if you used a dom parser to walk and only keep nodes with text, the html structure and the necessary tag properties (class/id only maybe?) you'd have significant savings. Perhaps the…

I wrote an in-house one for Ribbon. If there’s interest, will open source this. It’s amazing how much better our LLM outputs are with the reducer.

That would be wonderful.

Re: Web scraping with GPT-4o: powerful but expensive

#43

Post by Tostino » Mon, Sep 02, 2024, 11:47 PM UTC

axg11 wrote: post #39

parhamn wrote: post #31

Is there a "html reducer" out there? I've been considering writing one. If you take a page's source it's going to be 90% garbage tokens -- random JS, ads, unnecessary properties, aggressive nesting for layout rendering, etc. I feel like if you used a dom parser to walk and only keep nodes with text, the html structure and the necessary tag properties (class/id only maybe?) you'd have significant savings. Perhaps the…

I wrote an in-house one for Ribbon. If there’s interest, will open source this. It’s amazing how much better our LLM outputs are with the reducer.

I'm absolutely interested in this.

Re: Web scraping with GPT-4o: powerful but expensive

#44

Post by parhamn » Mon, Sep 02, 2024, 11:48 PM UTC

axg11 wrote: post #39

parhamn wrote: post #31

Is there a "html reducer" out there? I've been considering writing one. If you take a page's source it's going to be 90% garbage tokens -- random JS, ads, unnecessary properties, aggressive nesting for layout rendering, etc. I feel like if you used a dom parser to walk and only keep nodes with text, the html structure and the necessary tag properties (class/id only maybe?) you'd have significant savings. Perhaps the…

I wrote an in-house one for Ribbon. If there’s interest, will open source this. It’s amazing how much better our LLM outputs are with the reducer.

Yes! Happy to try it on a fairly large user base and contribute to it! Email in bio if you want a beta user.

Re: Web scraping with GPT-4o: powerful but expensive

#45

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Sep 02, 2024, 11:50 PM UTC

ErikAugust wrote: post #33

parhamn wrote: post #31

Is there a "html reducer" out there? I've been considering writing one. If you take a page's source it's going to be 90% garbage tokens -- random JS, ads, unnecessary properties, aggressive nesting for layout rendering, etc. I feel like if you used a dom parser to walk and only keep nodes with text, the html structure and the necessary tag properties (class/id only maybe?) you'd have significant savings. Perhaps the…

Running it through Readability: https://github.com/mozilla/readability

[deleted]

Re: Web scraping with GPT-4o: powerful but expensive

#46

Post by fsndz » Tue, Sep 03, 2024, 12:16 AM UTC

useful for one shot cases, but not more for the moment imo.

Re: Web scraping with GPT-4o: powerful but expensive

#47

Post by downWidOutaFite » Tue, Sep 03, 2024, 12:37 AM UTC

axg11 wrote: post #39

parhamn wrote: post #31

Is there a "html reducer" out there? I've been considering writing one. If you take a page's source it's going to be 90% garbage tokens -- random JS, ads, unnecessary properties, aggressive nesting for layout rendering, etc. I feel like if you used a dom parser to walk and only keep nodes with text, the html structure and the necessary tag properties (class/id only maybe?) you'd have significant savings. Perhaps the…

I wrote an in-house one for Ribbon. If there’s interest, will open source this. It’s amazing how much better our LLM outputs are with the reducer.

+1

Re: Web scraping with GPT-4o: powerful but expensive

#48

Post by purple-leafy » Tue, Sep 03, 2024, 1:55 AM UTC

parhamn wrote: post #31

Is there a "html reducer" out there? I've been considering writing one. If you take a page's source it's going to be 90% garbage tokens -- random JS, ads, unnecessary properties, aggressive nesting for layout rendering, etc. I feel like if you used a dom parser to walk and only keep nodes with text, the html structure and the necessary tag properties (class/id only maybe?) you'd have significant savings. Perhaps the…

I wrote one for a project that captures a portion of the DOM and sends it to an LLM.

It’s strips all JS/event handlers, most attributes and most CSS, and only keeps important text nodes

I needed this because I was using LLM to reimplement portions of a page using just tailwind, so needed to minimise input tokens

Re: Web scraping with GPT-4o: powerful but expensive

#49

Post by yuters » Tue, Sep 03, 2024, 2:05 AM UTC

luigi23 wrote: post #5

rietta wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because publishers don’t push structured data or APIs enough to satisfy demand for the data.

Got it, but why is it booming now and often it’s a showcase of llm model? Is there some secret market/ usecase for it?

I don't know if many has the same use case but... I'm heavily relying on this right now because my daughter started school. The school board, the school, and the teacher each use a different app to communicate important information to parents. I'm just trying to make one feed with all of them. Before AI it would have been hell to scrape, because you can imagine those apps are terrible.

Fun aside: The worst one of them is a public Facebook page. The school board is making it their official communication channel, which I find horrible. Facebook is making it so hard to scrape. And if you don't know, you can't even use Facebook's API for this anymore, unless you have a business verified account and go through a review just for this permission.

Re: Web scraping with GPT-4o: powerful but expensive

#50

Post by 7thpower » Tue, Sep 03, 2024, 2:10 AM UTC

axg11 wrote: post #39

parhamn wrote: post #31

Is there a "html reducer" out there? I've been considering writing one. If you take a page's source it's going to be 90% garbage tokens -- random JS, ads, unnecessary properties, aggressive nesting for layout rendering, etc. I feel like if you used a dom parser to walk and only keep nodes with text, the html structure and the necessary tag properties (class/id only maybe?) you'd have significant savings. Perhaps the…

I wrote an in-house one for Ribbon. If there’s interest, will open source this. It’s amazing how much better our LLM outputs are with the reducer.

Yes please