The Octoparse data expert will share you with some useful information about Octoparse. Let’s start with how Octoparse solves the most common problems in web scraping.
Most common problems in data scraping and how Octoparse helps with that
Scrape too much data from a website and it blocks your local IP?
This can be frustrating as once you get blocked by the website, you are not only disallowed to scrape it. You can’t even just access it for normal viewing.
What will you do if this happens? In the end, you may have to pay for a proxy to try to pass that by.
How does Octoparse protect your local IP? We’ve got Cloud Extraction, which runs your tasks 24/7. Tasks will be run on our Cloud servers, using our Cloud IPs. In this way, your local IP is very safe. Our Cloud includes hundreds of different IPs to help reduce the chance of being blocked.
Want a large amount of data but local scraping is taking forever to get the data?
Everyone wants more data, right? The more, the better. But scraping locally, the speed is quite limited. It highly depends on your device’s performance and network conditions. It takes up the computer’s memory, which may affect other working programs.
How does Cloud extraction help with that? As we mentioned before, Cloud extraction is based on our Cloud servers. That will release your local devices. Just click the start run button and you can leave it there. Turning off the software or even your device is fine.
And in the Cloud, your task will be split into sub-tasks. There will be multiple sub-tasks running at the same time to speed up. The higher plan you have, the more Cloud servers you get, and the faster your tasks run.
Want to update the product price every day?
Does any of you guys scrape E-commerce pricing data? Do you just Manually start the task every day when you turn on your computer? That could be time-consuming. And once you forget to do it, you lose one day’s data. So sad!
Octoparse scheduled extraction is designed to solve this! You have different intervals to choose from. Daily, weekly monthly, and even to scrape every 5-30 minutes. Just set it up and sit back to wait for the data to be scraped. Amazing right?
We have also added a new feature: the local schedule. The schedule is not only a cloud thing now. If you have websites that need to be accessed within your own network environment, you can schedule them to run every day on your device. But please remember not to turn on your computer and Octoparse of course.
Too many websites to scrape
I guess many of you need to scrape not one website. And most of the target websites are the top websites, right? We know it! Octoparse is famous for its easy-to-use interface. You can create a task within minutes with points and clicks. And our new auto-detection can help to speed up the creation process much more. But we’ve got something better.
And we have prepared more than a hundred pre-built templates for you! This is incredible. Check out all these templates! There must be one you need.
You just need to type in the parameters and start it. You don’t need to create anything but you get everything at hand.
Some useful features of Octoparse
Wait before the time
Have any of you used it in your tasks? This feature can be set up for any actions in your task workflow to help the page load or help to slow down your scraping. Many websites block you when you access them too frequently. So this feature will help you to reduce the chance of being blocked.
And to make the scraping more human-like, we have a random option, which means it will wait randomly on different pages.
Auto-rotate the browser and auto-clear cookies
Go to the setting of the task, and you can find it. Autorotate browser is actually rotating the UA, which is a string to tell the target website what kind of device you are accessing the page with. Changing the UA can help us pretend to be accessing the page on different browsers.
When you are browsing a page, it saves cookies, which include your login information, computer information, or network info. When scraping a website consistently with the same cookies, it is easy to detect a scraping bot activity. Octoparse will clear the cookies from time to time to pretend to be the first time to access the web page with this feature.
Triggers
It sounds like a technical thing, but Trigger can just be seen as a data filter. For example, when you scrape on an e-Commerce website, you only want to get products whose prices are under 1000 dollars. You may scrape all the data and filter the data based on the price column. With Trigger, you won’t need to filter after the data is scraped. You can use Trigger to set up a condition like when the price is larger than 1000, dump the line. Or when you scrape the news, you only want news posted today, you can set up a trigger to end the scraping when the post date is before today. This could help you to save time on cleaning data.
Incremental Extraction
Websites, such as News portals or forums, typically have new content added fast. To stay up-to-date with such websites, Octoparse’s incremental extraction allows you to extract updated data much more effectively by skipping the pages that have already been extracted, in another word, only scrape the new ones.
Incremental extraction will check if one URL has been scraped or not and skip it if it has been scrapped. So it saves a lot of time for scraping.
Ending
Alright! We have shared some really special features that can help you get data more efficiently.
