Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Web scraping with GPT-4o: powerful but expensive

blancas.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 177 posts

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

#61

Post by neeleshs »

jumploops wrote: post #41

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-semanti…

We did something similar -na although in a somewhat different context.

Translating a complex JSON representing an execution graph to a simpler graphviz dot format first and then feeding it to an LLM. We had decent success.

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

#63

Post by nsonha »

Most discussion I found about the topic is how to extract information. Is there any technique for extracting interactive elements? I reckon listing all of inputs/controls would not be hard, but finding the corresponding labels/articles might be tricky.

Another thing I wonder is, regarding text extraction, would it be a crazy idea to just snapshot the page and ask it to OCR & generate a bare minimum html table layout. That way both the content and the spatial relationship of elements are maintained (not sure how useful but I'd like to keep it anyway).

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

#67

Post by blackeyeblitzar »

I just want something that can take all my bookmarks, log into all by subscriptions using my credentials, and archive all those articles. I can then feed them to an LLM of my choice to ask questions later. But having the raw archive is the important part. I don’t know if there are any easy to use tools to do this though, especially with paywalled subscription based websites.

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

#68

Post by bongodongobob »

MaxPock wrote: post #12
bongodongobob wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bingo. During the pandemic, I started a project to keep myself busy by trying to scrape stock market ticker data and then do some analysis and make some pretty graphs out of it. I know there are paid services for this, but I wanted to pull it from various websites for free. It took me a couple months to get it right. There are so many corner cases to deal with if the pages aren't exactly the same each time you load t…

Was it profitable?

It was in the sense that I learned that trying to beat the market is fundamentally impossible/stupid, so just invest in index funds.

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

#69

Post by ozr »

GPT-4 (and Claude) are definitely the top models out there, but: Llama, even the 8b, is more than capable of handling extraction like this. I've pumped absurd batches through it via vLLM.

With serverless GPUs, the cost has been basically nothing.

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

#70

Post by suchintan »

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…

We wrote something like this to power Skyvern: https://github.com/Skyvern-AI/skyvern/blob/0d39e62df6c516e0a...

It's adapted from vimium and works like a charm. Distill the html down to it's important bits, and handle a ton of edge cases along the way haha

Post reply on HN