Nowadays, people live in the generation of big data. Many are familiar with big data terms like web mining, data mining, and web scraping. Before we dive into the top tools for web data mining, let’s first understand what web mining is.
What is Web Mining
According to Wikipedia, “Web mining is the application of data mining techniques to discover patterns from the World Wide Web”. From the explanation, we learn that the main purpose of web mining is to predict user behavior and discover useful information. It could benefit the business if people can make good use of this technique.
What are the Types of Web Mining?
There are 3 areas of web mining: web content mining, web usage mining, and web structure mining.
1. Web Content Mining
It is a process of collecting useful data from websites. This content includes news, comments, company information, product catalogs, etc.
2. Web Usage Mining
This is a process of identifying or discovering patterns from large data sets. And these patterns enable you to predict user behaviors or something like that. They are two types of techniques for patterns: pattern analysis tool and pattern discovery tool.
3. Web Structure Mining
Web structure mining is also known as link mining. It is a process to discover the relationship between web pages linked by information or direct link connection.
What is a Web Mining Tool?
A web data miner is computer software that uses data mining techniques to identify or discover patterns from large data sets, which includes content from websites, server logs, and other web-related data sources. The primary goal of web mining is to find patterns, relationships, and insights that can be used for various purposes, such as market research, customer behavior analysis, and improving user experience on websites.
7 Best Web Data Miners to Get Data Easily
Data is money in today’s world, but the information is huge, diverse, and redundant. Having the tools for mining is going to be a gateway to help you get the right information. In this post, you can learn the list of the 7 most popular web mining tools around the web.
1. Octoparse
Octoparse is a simple and powerful web data miner that automates web data extraction. It allows you to scrape data from any website with its easy auto-detecting function and preset templates. With Octoparse, you can finish the data mining process within a few clicks. However, it also provides advanced functions like AJAX, pagination, loop, IP proxies, cloud service, etc., to get more and accurate data.
You can extract data by using Octoparse web data miner within 3 easy steps. Or you can follow Octoparse detailed user guide.
Step 1: Copy and paste the target URL to Octoparse main panel after you have downloaded it on your devices.
Step 2: Extract data by the auto-detecting mode and customize the workflow with the tips it gives. You can check the data fields from the Preview panel.
Step 3: Run the task after you have a preview. After a few minutes, you can download the data to Excel, CSV, or other formats that are able for further use.
Supported Operating Systems: Windows XP/7/8/10 and macOS
Support Online Web Mining: Octoparse offers hundreds of online web scraping templates for popular websites. These templates enable users to effortlessly extract data from the web without coding skills needed, ensuring a seamless and efficient online mining experience.
Area of Web Mining: Web Content Mining
2. R
R is a language or a free environment for statistical computing and graphics. It has been made accessible from scripting languages like Python, Ruby, Perl, etc. The language is widely used among statisticians, data analysts, and data scientists for its powerful data manipulation capabilities and extensive library of statistical tools. Key features include Statistical Analysis, Data Manipulation, Graphical Capabilities, and Comprehensive Packages
Supported Operating Systems: UNIX platforms, Windows, MacOS
Area of Web Mining: Web Usage Mining
3. Oracle Data Mining (ODM)
Oracle Data Mining is a data mining software by Oracle. Oracle Data Mining is implemented in the Oracle Database kernel, and mining models are first-class database objects. Oracle Data Mining processes use built-in features of Oracle Database to maximize scalability and make efficient use of system resources.
Supported Operating Systems: Microsoft Windows
Area of Web Mining: Web Usage Mining
4. Tableau
Tableau offers a family of interactive data visualization products focused on business intelligence. Tableau allows instantaneous insight by transforming data into visually appealing, interactive visualizations called dashboards. This process takes only seconds or minutes rather than months or years and is achieved through the use of an easy-to-use, drag-and-drop interface.
Supported Operating Systems: Mac, Windows
Area of Web Mining: Web Usage Mining
5. Scrapy
Scrapy is an open-source framework for collecting data from websites. It is written in Python and you can write the rules to extract web data. It is a tool used for extracting data from websites, a process also known as web scraping. It has a wide range of uses such as data mining and automated testing. Key features and components of Scrapy include Spiders, Selectors, Item Pipelines, and Middlewares.
Supported Operating Systems: Linux, Windows, Mac, and BSD
Area of Web Mining: Web Content Mining
6. HITS algorithm
HITS, short for Hyperlink-Induced Topic Search, also known as hubs and authorities, is a link analysis algorithm that rates Web pages. In the HITS algorithm, the first step is to retrieve the most relevant pages to the search query. This set is called the root set and can be obtained by taking the top pages returned by a text-based search algorithm. A base set is generated by augmenting the root set with all the web pages that are linked from it and some of the pages that link to it. The web pages in the base set and all hyperlinks among those pages form a focused subgraph.
Area of Web Mining: Web Structure Mining
7. PageRank
PageRank Algorithm is a popular Web structure Mining Algorithm. PageRank is a link analysis algorithm and it assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references.
Area of Web Mining: Web Structure Mining
Final Thoughts
Hope you can get some ideas about web mining and web mining tools after reading this article. Choose the most suitable one according to your needs, and Octoparse will be the most recommended one if you don’t have coding knowledge but need data regularly. Start your data mining journey from now on with Octoparse’s 14-day free trial.
