New handwriting recognition study compares usage and performance of OCR, ICR and manual data entry

Companies still collect much of their critical information via pen and paper, yet they ultimately need this information to be available in their digital systems. How much do companies rely on this handwritten data, and how do they then convert it to the digital data they ultimately need? This recent study by the Association for Information and Image Management  (AIIM) gives the answers:

Companies rely on handwritten data…

From AIIM

Of the companies surveyed for the study,  50% identified handwritten information as important to their business processes and a full 25% identified it as playing a key role for them. This data could be generated internally, through employee evaluations, culture surveys, site inspections, invoices, walk sheets, etc. It could also come from current or potential clients, in the form of newsletter signup sheets, registration forms, raffle tickets, satisfaction surveys, comment cards, mail-orders forms, purchase orders, and even signed contracts.

…But they struggle to convert handwriting to digital data

data extraction

While companies rely on handwriting to collect data, they need that data entered into their computerized systems quickly and accurately. How are they bridging the paper and digital worlds? The reality is that most companies live with a painful disconnect between their data collection methods and digital data needs. More than half of those surveyed enter the data by hand, while another third rely on OCR, and another 12% use ICR (intelligent character recognition). Before Captricity, there really were no other options available.

Manual Entry, OCR & ICR are Woefully Inadequate:

Unfortunately, all three options – OCR, ICR, and manual entry – come with significant trade-offs in terms of flexibility, turnaround time, and/or quality.

    All of us at some point have dealt with manual data entry. It’s slow, often expensive, not always accurate, and can lead to significant lag times in getting your data. Many companies tell us they have backlogs of months or even years that their manual data entry staff just have not been able to deal with.

    OCR (Optical Character Recognition) converts images of text into a digital, machine-readable format. While it tends to work adequately for well-scanned and printed text, it is extremely inaccurate for handwriting, and yields only a “bag of text”, not structured data. In other words, if you start with a scanned, typed form, OCR will give you a .txt file, not a data set. And if you start with a form filled in by hand, OCR will give you very little useful data at all.

    ICR (Intelligent Character Recognition) was created to more accurately read handwriting. If you have ever filled out a driver’s license application or customs form, you’re already familiar with the highly-regulated ICR-ready forms, where boxes or “combs” (small vertical lines) separate each letter. While this system can read hand-printed text a bit better, it’s as limiting as a Scantron bubblesheet is to teachers who want to ask open-ended questions. ICR makes free-form text and short answers almost impossible. Furthermore, setting up ICR-compatible forms takes time and expertise, requiring significant up-front investment. For the vast majority of those organizations that rely on handwritten data, this is not a practical solution.  They are in a tough spot.

Enter Captricity for REAL handwriting recognition.

Our unique data capture technology was created specifically to turn any handwritten form, no matter the format, into digital data quickly and accurately. Multiple-choice, numerical response, likert scale, short answers and long answers are no problem! There is minimal set-up and no software to install.  Take your completed forms, scan or photograph them, and upload the images to Captricity. Our special mix of computer algorithms and human intelligence extracts data faster than manual re-keying and more accurately than OCR, with more flexibility than ICR.

Source:http://captricity.com/handwriting-recognition-study-on-ocr-icr-manual-data-entry/

Web Scraping - Data Collection or Illegal Activity?

Web Scraping Defined

We've all heard the term "web scraping" but what is this thing and why should we really care about it?  Web scraping refers to an application that is programmed to simulate human web surfing by accessing websites on behalf of its "user" and collecting large amounts of data that would typically be difficult for the end user to access.  Web scrapers process the unstructured or semi-structured data pages of targeted websites and convert the data into a structured format.  Once the data is in a structured format, the user can extract or manipulate the data with ease.  Web scraping is very similar to web indexing (used by most search engines), but the end motivation is typically much different.  Whereas web indexing is used to help make search engines more efficient, web scraping is typically used for different reasons like change detection, market research, data monitoring, and in some cases, theft.

Why Web Scrape?

There are lots of reasons people (or companies) want to scrape websites, and there are tons of web scraping applications available today.  A quick Internet search will yield numerous web scraping tools written in just about any programming language you prefer.  In today's information-hungry environment, individuals and companies alike are willing to go to great lengths to gather information about all sorts of topics.  Imagine a company that would really like to gather some market research on one of their leading competitors...might they be tempted to invoke a web scraper that gathers all the information for them?  Or, what if someone wanted to find a vulnerable site that allowed otherwise not-so-free downloads?  Or, maybe a less than honest person might want to find a list of account numbers on a site that failed to properly secure them.  The list goes on and on.

I should mention that web scraping is not always a bad thing.  Some websites allow web scraping, but many do not.  It's important to know what a website allows and prohibits before you scrape it.

The Problem With Web Scraping

Web scraping rides a fine line between collecting information and stealing information.  Most websites have a copyright disclosure statement that legally protects their website information.  It's up to the reader/user/scraper to read these disclosure statements and follow along legally and ethically.  In fact, the F5.com website presents the following copyright disclosure:  "All content included on this site, such as text, graphics, logos, button icons, images, audio clips, and software, including the compilation thereof (meaning the collection, arrangement, and assembly), is the property of F5 Networks, Inc., or its content and software suppliers, except as may be stated otherwise, and is protected by U.S. and international copyright laws."  It goes on to say, "We reserve the right to make changes to our site and these disclaimers, terms, and conditions at any time."

So, scraper beware!  There have been many court cases where web scraping turned into felony offenses.  One case involved an online activist who scraped the MIT website and ultimately downloaded millions of academic articles.  This guy is now free on bond, but faces dozens of years in prison and $1 million if convicted.  Another case involves a real estate company who illegally scraped listings and photos from a competitor in an attempt to gain a lead in the market.  Then, there's the case of a regional software company that was convicted of illegally scraping a major database company's websites in order to gain a competitive edge.  The software company had to pay a $20 million fine and the guilty scraper is serving three years probation.  Finally, there's the case of a medical website that hosted sensitive patient information.  In this case, several patients had posted personal drug listings and other private information on closed forums located on the medical website.  The website was scraped by a media-research firm, and all this information was suddenly public.

While many illegal web scrapers have been caught by the authorities, many more have never been caught and still run loose on websites around the world.  As you can see, it's increasingly important to guard against this activity.  After all, the information on your website belongs to you, and you don't want anyone else taking it without your permission.

The Good News

As we've noted, web scraping is a real problem for many companies today.  The good news is that F5 has web scraping protection built into the Application Security Manager (ASM) of its BIG-IP product family.  As you can see in the screenshot below, the ASM provides web scraping protection against bots, session opening anomalies, session transaction anomalies, and IP address whitelisting.

The bot detection works with clients that accept cookies and process JavaScript.  It counts the client's page consumption speed and declares a client as a bot if a certain number of page changes happen within a given time interval.  The session opening anomaly spots web scrapers that do not accept cookies or process JavaScript.  It counts the number of sessions opened during a given time interval and declares the client as a scraper if the maximum threshold is exceeded.  The session transaction anomaly detects valid sessions that visit the site much more than other clients.  This defense is looking at a bigger picture and it blocks sessions that exceed a calculated baseline number that is derived from a current session table.  The IP address whitelist allows known friendly bots and crawlers (i.e. Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask, etc), and this list can be populated as needed to fit the needs of your organization.

I won't go into all the details here because I'll have some future articles that dive into the details of how the ASM protects against these types of web scraping capabilities.  But, suffice it to say, ASM does a great job of protecting your website against the problem of web scraping.

ASM Web Scrape

I'm sure as you studied the screenshot above you also noticed lots of other protection capabilities the ASM provides...brute force attack prevention, customized attack signatures, Denial of Service protection, etc.  You might be wondering how it does all that stuff as well.  Give us a little feedback on the topics you would like to see, and we'll start posting some targeted tech tips for you!

Thanks for reading this introductory web scraping article...and, be sure to come back for the deeper look into how the ASM is configured to handle this problem. For more information, check out this video from Peter Silva where he discusses ASM botnet and web scraping defense.

Source:https://devcentral.f5.com/articles/web-scraping-data-collection-or-illegal-activity#.Ur5Qg849BIA

Tips For Easier Product Uploads In Magento

Uploading products into Magento can be a very time consuming task, especially when you need to upload several hundred or even several thousand products.  Fortunately there are some shortcuts that you can take to make this a quicker process.  This guide will provide a high level overview as to the most effective methods for achieving quicker bulk uploads into Magento.  We also suggest you refer to the Magento user guide for detailed tutorials on performing some of these tasks.

Utilize Magento’s Bulk Product Import Feature:

In addition to giving you the ability to add products individually, Magento also provides bulk import capabilities.  By utilizing Magento’s bulk import feature a user can import a large number of products from a single CSV file.  While the formatting requirements for bulk product uploads into Magento are very specific, you can easily get an understanding as to how your product must be formatted by exporting existing products out of Magento into a CSV file.  It’s important to note that since some of your products may be configurable or have multiple variations the CSV  formatting requirements for these products will differ from those without.

Upload Images In Bulk:

Instead of individually uploading images at the product level you can upload images in bulk.  Bulk image uploads in Magento are always performed via FTP.  Additionally, images must be appropriately labeled according to the SKU and or SKU variation of the product they are associated with.

Add Categories and Attributes In Bulk:

While this does not directly correlate to uploading individual products, taking this step will make the entire import process far more efficient.  Preparing all of your attributes and categories for a bulk import before uploading any products will allow you to easily associate products with categories and attributes that you will have already created.

Limit File Size For Bulk Imports:

By keeping the number of products you are uploading to Magento at one time to a reasonable number you will prevent any potential server time outs or delays in successfully uploading all of your product data.  Dividing a CSV file with 500 + products into two or three files and running separate uploads will require a little more time on the front end but will invariably prevent future headaches.

Updating Existing Products:

You can also utilize Magento’s bulk import feature to update existing products on your storefront.  To make bulk updates to existing products via a CSV file you only need to import the SKU field as well as the field(s) which you would like to update.  Once successfully uploaded into Magento your changes will take effect on your storefront.

If you’re looking for a faster and easier way to upload and manage both product data and images in Magento, ClaraStream provides a web based application that will integrate directly with your Magento storefront, allowing you to quickly and easily upload new products or make updates to existing products, and avoid tedious data formatting in spreadsheets and hours of manual data entry.  Take a quick TOUR now to learn how ClaraStream can help you save time uploading and managing your product data.

Source:https://www.clarastream.com/2013/06/tips-for-easier-product-uploads-in-magento/

Writing eCommerce Product Descriptions That Sell, Sell, Sell...

Even in the days of massive retail sites with thousands of products that are often "bulk uploaded" from a database, product descriptions are still a critical factor in deciding whether a visitor to an ecommerce store buys or not. Working together, the description and photos should give the website visitor all the same information, and the same sense of desire, that they'd get by viewing the product in a physical store. If they're left in any doubt about exactly what the features of the product are, or how it will benefit them, they'll move on without hesitation.

Writing product descriptions, along with having great product photos, is therefore a vital tool which the store owner can use to take control of their sales.

Writing Product Descriptions Writing Product Descriptions Writing product descriptions is an art, but once mastered it can provide SEO benefits as well as compelling visitors to click on the 'buy' button. A best practice includes doing AB or multivariate testing of different product descriptions to increase their effectiveness. For example, the above test from Talbot recovery tested only text changes on this signup page. Their testing group Fathom recorded a 184% improvement with the copy on the version to the right (with more bullet points) at a 99% confidence level. (Test results supplied by Which Test Won.)

The Challenge Of Writing Effective Product Descriptions

Product descriptions are tough to write well, because in a short space of typically 60-80 words they need to:

    Persuasively describe the benefits of the product and what problem it solves

    Describe any important features which aren't clear from the product photos

    Use SEO keyphrases to make the page rank more highly in search engines

    Differentiate the product from similar ones in a way that encourages purchase

    Perhaps explain why the product should be purchased from that website versus others

Faced with such a challenge, website owners might be tempted to use the standard description provided by the manufacturer, or copy text from a competitor's website. But this could lead to Google penalizing the page as it would contain duplicate content, and it misses a big opportunity to give the ecommerce site a unique voice which builds the brand and keeps visitors coming back.

There are plenty of professional copywriters who specialize in writing product descriptions for ecommerce, who the job can be outsourced to. Yet many online store owners will take the view that no-one knows the product or market as well as they do, in which case there are a few things to consider when writing product descriptions that sell.

Establishing The 'Voice' Of The Product

To set the tone when writing product descriptions, knowing the audience is half the battle - Moms in their 40s will respond to a different style than teenage boys do. But the voice of the tone is important too. For example, Moms in their 40s might be the target market for a fashionable handbag or a game for their child - but those products wouldn't be written about in the same way.

The identity of the brand should also be considered. For example, the J. Peterman Company gives products in their men's and women's ranges a different voice, but the brand's tone is so strong it'd be instantly recognizable even out of context.

Structuring the description

It can be a good idea to separate out information which may not be emotionally captivating, but still important to know, such as product dimensions, so it can be easily browsed without getting in the way of the main product description.  This approach follows the typical buying cycle or funnel through which each buyer moves as they build their interest in a product, which typically results in a desire for more detailed information as the buyer approaches the purchasing stage. The British electrical retailer Comet does this well, by having a separate 'technical specifications' panel. This allows them to concentrate on writing product descriptions that emphasize the benefits, knowing that the nitty-gritty is all in place.

The structure of the main description should be kept in mind too - opening with an attention-grabbing question or statement, moving on to describing how it can fit into the customer's life, and ending with a strong call-to-action. A call-to-action is the customer's reason to take action by clicking the 'buy' button right now: this could include 'free shipping this week only' or 'enter this code for 20% off your purchase'.

Keeping this structure in mind also helps to keep the inspiration flowing when writing product descriptions for tens or hundreds of items.

Writing Product Descriptions That Turn Features Into Benefits

It's often said that people don't buy a drill, they buy a hole in a wall. This means that people buy products to solve a problem, so writing product descriptions is all about showing how the features of the product will benefit the buyer.

That means that it's of no real interest in itself that a shaving foam contains extracts of Aloe Vera (feature), but it becomes relevant when mentioning that it means it won't irritate your skin like other products might (benefit).

The same feature might offer a different benefit depending on the target audience. For example, a 100% cotton t-shirt might have the benefits of being:

    1. Easy to wash (for mothers)

    2. Lightweight to battle the summer heat (for women in their 20s planning a vacation)

    3. Environmentally compatible because it's made of man-made fibers (for an audience which is concerned about environmental impact)

Econsultancy has some great examples of product descriptions which effectively sell the benefits and give the reader a vision of how the product will fit into their lifestyle.

Writing Product Descriptions With SEO In Mind

A page of original content about a product is a boon for getting a page indexed in search engines. While writing product descriptions is primarily an exercise in appealing to the potential customer, a few simple considerations will make sure the SEO potential is maximized too:

    Include a headline which uses the targeted SEO keyphrase, but also grabs the reader - just using the name of the product is a missed opportunity

    Use keywords selectively in the description. So if the keyphrase is 'men's cutthroat razor', it's a missed opportunity to call it a 'shaving device' in the description

    Make use of image captions. Rather than just the product name, this is another chance to include a keyword-rich sentence which also appeals to the customer

    Include the keyword in the title and description meta-tags in the source code of the web page

    Include the keyword in alt tags of any images, in title tags associated with links out from the description (if links to other sections are used) and also in the anchor text of any links pointing to the page

    Assign high level headline tags like H1, h3 or H3 to headlines and subheads containing the keywords

    Use the keywords in the file (URL) names associated with the page (as part of all of the page depending on the naming structure associated with the site's shopping cart)

    Consider using keywords in tags associated with the page

While this article doesn't focus on keyword research, it is a wise idea to use search terms which fit multiple parameters including:

    1. Describing the product in the same way  the target audience uses when looking for the product (often gained from the site's analytics programs and using a keyword research tool

    2. Looking for search volume in a keyword research tool to ensure there is sufficient search volume for these terms

    3. Assessing the level of competition for the term (either through pay per click estimators, analyzing the top search results and looking at factors like competitor page rank, number of items in the index, or competitor traffic using audit tools such as Compete.com)

How To Constantly Improve Product Description Writing

While using the above approach as a starting point, there will come a time when the more diligent eCommerce marketer will subject their product descriptions to some type of testing. Typically this means using some type of web page optimization program (or using a pay per click campaign with alternate landing pages) that can provide testing of the page against an alternate. While there are many tools for this (Google Website Optimizer is an example of a fully featured tool that is available free), the important point is to subject descriptions to the same rigor of testing that other elements of the page are such as "buy buttons" or offers. And while this type of process may seem to yield small improvements, if done across a large number of pages, with high traffic patterns or over a long period of time, the cumulative results can be quite profitable.

Source:http://www.ultracart.com/resources/articles/writing-ecommerce-product-descriptions/

Data cleaning service to clean ways to retrieve

Data cleansing or data scrubbing and one or to identify an act of fraud or false proof. Is dataset table to the right? Many companies, business sales and sales by the maid service to provide data to the database. Data cleaning company helps to set the date and error free.

After cleaning removes all consistencies Dataset is consistent with other similar systems. Data validation is the process of separating and removing some typos. Data transformation, statistical methods, parsing, syntax errors and eliminate duplicate data as known technique is used for cleaning. Nice and clean data needed to meet the criteria listed below:

Accuracy: density, integrity and stability.

Completion of missing data must be corrected.

Density: Data released and the price in proportion to the number of values must be well known.

Consistency: challenges and sense deals with the differences.

Uniformity: focused on irregularities or indiscretions.

Integrity: a combined value of wholeness and soundness criteria.

Unique: It is related to the number of duplicate data.

Data cleaning services are offered by companies:

Remove Duplicate ideas.

Tagging and Identification of a record or facts.

Remove duplicate or fake and false evidence.

Data verification.

Delete old records.

Opt-in and opt facts as third parties in order to remove the list

Data cleansing, aggregation and organization.

Identify incomplete or inaccurate facts or figures.

Product specifications, order and establish the facts, including metaphors, improved.

Duplicate data or data which records seem to be as many as received.

Common problems of data cleaning applications:

Sometimes there is a loss of information in the data. No doubt, invalid and duplicate entries are removed, but often the information is limited and is insufficient for a number of entries. It also leads to a loss of information is removed. Data cleansing is very expensive and time consuming. Thus it is important to maintain effectively.

Fortunately, the benefits worth more and more challenges.

And most companies these days, depending on the existence and quality of the data that have business continuity. Data mainly customer information, customer profiles, different products, addresses and important people and market research, etc. This information is mainly collected from various databases and phone numbers are on the technical details. Since these databases use different formats or styles, the data collected are very clumsy and sometimes incomprehensible, but which we cannot control the way data is stored in the database.

So, the best solution for us to organize data is to implement a data called cleaning process. there are various software available in the market that can help clean data are applied.

It is a very important process for their business activities depending on the quality of the data.

Which in turn will lead to losses?

Ways to clean data to retrieve:

1) When importing data, make sure that there is a common format for applying anywhere it is stored, this will ensure consistency.

2) Dictionary software or use MS Word to check for spelling mistakes or grammatical errors frequently. This must be done manually, it can be very time consuming for the entire above amount of information.

3) When copying to an external source of data is always copied into the notepad so that all types of formatting are done.

Source:http://www.tampabaycleaning.com/172-data-cleaning-service-to-clean-ways-to-retrieve-2

The 5 minute guide to scraping data from PDFs

Every data journalist knows the feeling: you’re working on a massive project, you’ve finally found the data… but it is in PDF format.

Last month I had a crime reporter from Cape Town in one of my data journalism training sessions, who had managed to get around 60 PDF pages worth of stats out the relevant authorities. She explored and analyzed them by hand, which took days. That set me thinking. The problem can’t be all that uncommon and there must be a good few data journalists out there who could use a quick guide to scraping spreadsheets from PDFs.

The ideal of course is not getting your data in PDF form in the first place. It all comes from the same database, and it shouldn’t be any effort for the people concerned to save the same data in an Excel spreadsheet. The unfortunate truth however is that a lot of officials aren’t willing to do that out of fear that you’ll tinker with their data.

There are some web services like cometdocs or pdftoexcelonline that could help you out. Or you could try to build a scraper yourself, but then you have to read Paul Bradshaw‘s Scraping for Journalists first.

Tabula

My favourite tool though is Tabula. Tabula describes itself as “a tool for liberating data tables trapped inside PDF files”. It’s fairly easy to use too. All you have to do is import your PDF, select your data, push a button and there is your spreadsheet! You save the scraped page in CSV and from there you can import it into any spreadsheet program.

One small problem is that Tabula only scrapes one PDF page at a time. So 10 PDF pages worth of data gives you 10 spreadsheets.

Installing Tabula is a piece of cake: download, unzip and run. Tabula is written in Java (so you should have Java installed) and uses Ruby for scraping, which is one of the languages used on Scraperwiki to build tailor-made PDF scrapers.

Source:http://memeburn.com/2013/11/the-5-minute-guide-to-scraping-data-from-pdfs/

Website data scraping is not an easy

Website data scraping is not an easy task and it takes tremendous time when it comes to analysis and restructuring of the data. It is for these reasons that, you should visit us as we make this process look simple. We have a team of skilled and experienced data scrapers who will make the result from the project that you present future proof and flexible enough to fit into as many situations as you may think of or you may be finding solutions for.

Indeed, our website data scraping experts are knowledgeable and they will use their experienced hands to deliver the best data to you and within a short duration. In Web Data Scraping process input source will be web resource and most common output formats are xls, csv, XML, notepad, word file etc. Website Data Scraping having excellence to scrape database from HTML, XML, text, word file, images, reports, PDF files etc.

As world is growing fast every businesses having higher value of time so values of manual work is going rapidly down day by day. Imagine how many days it will take to scrape millions of records manually, may be over years. As world is rising extremely fast so we have to upgrade ourselves with time and its necessities.

Website Data Scraping introducing ourselves as world’s most preferred and reliable data scraping service provider. Website Data Scraping equipped with latest tools, techniques, technology and experienced manpower. We upgrade our tools, technology as per client’s necessity after certain interval to convey tremendous quality to our worldwide clients.

We are capable to deal with composite type of web scraping requirement and deliver world class quality before expected time. Our outstanding quality, time duration and previous client’s feedback force us to self-importance on ourselves as one of consistent and high quality web scraping service provider. High quality, time duration to complete work and price quote is matters a lot for any client and we try to fulfill all these needs.

We always prefer our entire client as priority customer’s weather we are getting business of only $10 from them. Website Data Scraping never compromise in quality and delivery time and due to these reasons you can try us for your Web Data Scraping requirement.

Web Data Scraping

Can you imagine to get thousands, lacks or millions of web based database in usable format only in 2-10 days? Yes, now its possible with Website Data Scraping. Get over thousands of web based database scraped only in few days and reuse those database for various purposes.

Business Directory Scraping

Online business directories are the best sources to explore the contact details of required service provider. We can help out to build your own niche business directory or in email marketing campaign by collection validated email ids. Don’t hesitate and contact us with business directory link in order to start working.

Web Research and Data Collection

Website Data Scraping having experienced team for internet searching, web research and data collection to satisfy our client’s requirement and make some profit for organization. Our primary key is to satisfy our customers’ needs at lowest price quote.

- Business directory scraping – yellow pages, yell, yelp, scoot, manta, lawyers, b2bindex etc.
- Report mining, document data scraping, PDF and scanned images scraping.
- Metadata scraping, web crawling, text corpus, weather data mining, stock data scraping.
- Job wrapping, resume scraping, students email id scraping, school and university data scraping.
- Web research, web data mash up, internet searching and data collection.
- Product scraping, image scraping, online price comparison and comparison of feed aggregates.
- Data scraping from LinkedIn, twitter, face book and other social networking sites.
- Product scraping from eBay, Amazon, eCommerce and online shopping websites.

Source:http://www.bharatbhasha.net/finance-and-business.php/404654

Web Screen Scrape With a Software Program

Which software do you use for data mining? How much time does it take in mining required data and is it able to present in a customized format? Extracting data from the web is

A tedious job, if done manually but the moment you use an application or program, web screen scrape job becomes easy.

Using an application would certainly make data mining an easy affair but the problem is that which application to choose. Availability of a number of software programs makes

it difficult to choose one but you has to select a program because you can âEUR(TM)t keep mining data manually. Start your search for a data mining software program with

Determining your needs. First note down the time a program takes to completing a project.

Quick scraping

The software should nâEUR(TM)t take much time and if it does then there âEUR(TM)s no use of investing in the software. A software program that needs time for data mining would

Only save your labor and not time. Keep this factor in mind as you can âEUR(TM)t keeps waiting for hours for the software to provide you data. Another reason behind choosing a

Quick software program is that you a quick scraping tool would provide you latest data.

Presentation

Extracted data should be presented in readable format that you could use in a hassle free manner. For instance the web screen scrape program should be able to provide data in

Spreadsheet or database file or in any other format as desired by the user. Data that âEUR(TM)s difficult to read is good for nothing. Presentation matters most. If you

ArenâEUR(TM)t able to understand the data then how could you use in future.

Coded program

Invest in web screen scrape program coded for your project and not for everyone. It should be dedicated to you and not made for public. There are groups that provide coded

programs for data mining. They charge a fee for programming but the job they do worth a fee. Look for a reliable group and get the software program that could make your data

Mining job a lot easier.

Whether you are looking for contact details of your targeted audiences or you want to keep a close watch on social media, you need web screen scrape service that would save

Your time and labor. If you âEUR(TM)re using a software program for data mining then you should make sure that the program works according to your wishes.

Source: http://goarticles.com/article/Web-Screen-Scrape-With-a-Software-Program/7763109/

The Simple Way to Scrape an HTML Table: Google Docs

Raw data is the best data, but a lot of public data can still only be found in tables rather than as directly machine-readable files. One example is the FDIC’s List of Failed Banks. Here is a simple trick to scrape such data from a website: Use Google Docs.

The table on that page is even relatively nice because it includes some JavaScript to sort it. But a large table with close to 200 entries is still not exactly the best way to analyze that data.

I first tried dabbledb for this task, and it worked in principle. The only problem was that it only extracted 17 rows for some reason. I have no idea what the issue was, but I didn’t want to invest the time to figure it out.

After some digging around and even considering writing my own throw-away extraction script, I remembered having read something about Google Docs being able to import tables from websites. And indeed, it has a very useful function called ImportHtml that will scrape a table from a page.

To extract a table, create a new spreadsheet and enter the following expression in the top left cell: =ImportHtml(URL, “table”, num). URL here is the URL of the page (between quotation marks), “table” is the element to look for (Google Docs can also import lists), and num is the number of the element, in case there are more on the same page (which is rather common for tables). The latter supposedly starts at 1, but I had to use 0 to get it to pick up the correct table on the FDIC page.

Once this is done, Google Docs retrieves the data and inserts it into the spreadsheet, including the headers. The last step is to download the spreadsheet as a CSV file.

This is very simple and quick, and a much better idea than writing a custom script. Of course, the real solution would be to offer all data as a CSV file in addition to the table to begin with. But until that happens, we will need tools like this to get the data into a format that is actually useful.

Source:http://eagereyes.org/data/scrape-tables-using-google-docs

Professional Web Scraping Services, Web scraping Technique

Web scraping is a technique used for extracting the information from different websites. They make use of software programs which simulate a human who surfs the internet to gather information. A human browser would enter the url, request the web page, copy the information and paste it. Similarly the programs or scripts are written in such a way that the software establishes a connection with the server and requests the web page, the server then sends an acknowledgement and the pages requested. The scripts then capture the data and store them as structured data.

Web scraping is implemented using HTTP protocol or by embedding web browsers. The aim of web scraping is to capture unstructured data from the target websites and convert them into structured data which can be stored and maintained in database for any future use. With the growing usage of internet for daily activities like weather monitoring, information gathering, price comparison etc, web scraping has become a great necessity.

Most of the data present in websites are of HTML format which are machine readable. The process of extracting data from HTML web pages is called as web screen scraping. Screen scraping uses software programs or scripts written to read the data from terminal port or the screen rather than the database. This enables the extraction of data in human readable format.

Website scraping enables extracting information from various websites where they are stored reaching out even to the hidden ones. Web page scraping involves collecting information from target websites and saving the data in a new database to enable easy filtering and sorting the data.  The web scrapers are designed in such a way that they gather the required information; convert the unstructured data into a structured format, save them data by assembling them in a proper way for future usage. The output data can be saved in any database, spreadsheet, text file or any other required format.

The major advantages of using web scraping tools are accuracy and efficiency. The manual work of searching for the information, gathering the data, copying and pasting would take a lot of time making the job boring and tiresome. The web scrapers complete the task in very less time making the whole process easier. The manual work may not provide that accurate data while the web page scraping tools provide great accuracy. These tools also enable retrieving any type of data and images i.e. text, word, pdf, jpeg or gif from websites having different technologies like php, html, jsp, asp, java script, ajax etc. The scraped data can also be converted into desired format like XML, CSV, EXCEL or databases like MS Access, MS-SQL, MySQL etc.

With the availability of web scraping tools, gathering information is no more time consuming. One need not spend hours to complete such a simple task. The scrapers do the work for you.

Source:http://www.webscreenscraping.com/hello-world

Hotelpronto.com Data Scraping

Are you looking for very reliable and useful information on hotels anywhere around the world? It might be virtually impossible to go anywhere if you do not go online. However, even the internet is so vast with lots of info about hotels, accommodation and so on and therefore you need targeted research. This is called data scraping. When looking for targeted info regarding hotels online, this is called hotelpronto data scrapping. This particular kind of data scrapping offers all information you would ever need about hotels, their location, cuisines, accommodation, rates and so on across the world or any specific place.

Whether you are a businessperson dealing with hotels or a traveler looking for the next hotel destination across the world, you need to trust our hotelpronto data scrapping service. We are a leading data scrapping service provider online. Hotel pronto data scrapping is one of our favorites. When it comes to this particular data, we’re experts and very understanding too. We understand that you need quality, useful and reliable data about hotels and restaurants. We are dedicated to offering exactly what you want while giving you extra surprises regarding quality standards you had even not thought about in the first place.

The techniques we apply to scrap hotelpronto data are so particular to us. Our skilled experts have devised very effective ways for quick and more accurate data scrapping and that is what they use to ensure that your hotelpronto data scrapping is done differently in terms of promptness and cost. We also help you with insights about better and cost effective routes to take regarding the kind of data you want to scrap from the web. In general, our prices are literary workable. You realize that you can never compare the quality of our hotel pronto data scrapping with the quality you get and that is why every client who discovers us never looks back. Decide today and take up our hotelpronto data scrapping and change the experience for good forever.

Source:http://www.scrape-web-data.com/hotelpronto-com-data-scraping.html

Hotelpronto Data Scraping

HotelPronto is the web’s leading hotel booking agency specializing in quality hotel accommodation at discounted rates. HotelPronto provides a simple and cost effective way to make hotel bookings quickly. Expedia is the one of best site for travel deals – hotels, flights etc. Our company specializes in Expedia data scraping and we have managed to polish our skills over the years that we have been in the industry. Our main aim is to establish trustworthy relationships with our clients through hard work and delivering quality services. During the time that we have been in the industry, we have managed to convince our clients the need to outsource data scraping services to us. Through this, we have acquired a large pool of clients and we would still love to deliver our services to more clients.

We use data scraping tools that have a broad collective power similar to that of a traditional search engine. The only difference between what we offer and what a search engine offers is the refined touch of a personal assistant.

In addition to giving you quality data scraping services, we ensure that our lines of communication are open at all times in case you have any queries or clarifications that you may require. Our goal is to improve communication with our clients in order to build a strong base for trust. We value your trust and the business that you bring to us and in return we will ensure that we deliver the best quality services. Furthermore, we will explain to you all that you need to know step by step without adding technical jargon so that you know what you are getting.

We use tools and technology that are efficient in pulling needed information based on whichever criteria you need. We are therefore able to get valuable information for you. All you have to do is to tell us what kind of information you need and leave the rest to us. Your Expedia data scraping experience with us will be no less than impressive and we guarantee that we will deliver your data scraping project on time as required. Contact us for valuable Expedia data scraping services.

Contact us with your scraping requirement and the information which you required so we can prepare sample for you before fix the deal. Our contact us, get cost effective solutions.

Source:http://www.lalinartdataentry.com/outsource-hotelpronto-data-scraping-services.html

How to Scrape and Crawl Data from Websites Like Amazon.com and EBay

Say you have an e-commerce site like E-Bay or Amazon, and you sell multiple products that you get from other vendors; you have to rely on all these vendors to provide you with the product details about all items available through your site. There are a couple time consuming ways to do this.

First, you can rely on the outside vendors to provide you with the pertinent information to implement piece by piece on your own site (called product feeds), or you can visit each vendor’s site and cut and paste from the specific web pages where the product is located.

Either of these options are a lot of work, but this information is crucial to the user who might end up buying the product. The point is, you need this information to optimize your sales, so why not do it the easy way?

Let Optimum7 provide data scraping for you. We can use techniques that will simply extract information from the web and provide information feeds for each of your products, without the need for laborious, time consuming  ‘cut and paste’ or text implementation chores.

Web scraping or data crawling will search web content over the internet in a way that simulates human exploration, except that is an automated way of harvesting content. It will then bring the pertinent information back to you as structured data that you can store in a database or on a spreadsheet, and you will be able to analyze it later.

You can use this for information for online price comparisons, product information, web content Mashup, web research and web integration. We can even perform screen scraping for you for visual data to use with your products. Therefore, you can greatly enhance your online business, not only in terms of content/information feeds, but you will have all sorts of analytical data at your disposal.  The information can be stored and referenced to help you make sound business decision about the management and development of your e-business.

Web crawling is similar in that it uses a sophisticated computer program that “crawls through” the World Wide Web in a methodical, systematic, automated way. These programs are sometimes referred to as spiders, ants, or web robots. They are commonly employed by search engines to provide the most relevant, up to date information.

You can use web crawling to provide automatic maintenance on your site because it can be tasked to routinely check all your links and validate your HTML code, to make sure all the underlying features on your site that users depend on are still working. It will also make a copy of all the pages it visits, usually beginning with a list of targeted URLs (called seeds) that you have amassed in your database from the previous visitors to your site. Therefore web crawling is a useful tool to help you grow your online business.

Optimum7 can take care of both web scraping and web crawling for you. Give us a call today to see how these functions can make your online business run smoother.

Source:http://www.optimum7.com/internet-marketing/ecommerce/how-to-scrape-and-crawl-data-from-websites-like-amazon-com-and-ebay.html

Scraping the Web for Commodity Futures Contract Data

I’m fascinated by commodity futures contracts.  I worked on a project in which we predicted the yield of grains using climate data (which exposed me to the futures markets) but we never attempted to predict the price.  What fascinates me about the price data is the complexity of the data.  Every tick of price represents a transaction in which one entity agrees to sell something (say 10,000 bushels of corn) and the other entity agrees to buy that thing at a future point in time (I use the word entity rather than person because the markets are theoretically anonymous).  Thus, price is determined by how much people think the underlying commodity is worth.

The data is complex because the variables that effect the price span many domains.  The simplest variables are climatic and economic.  Prices will rise if the weather is bad for a crop, supply is running thin, or if there is a surge in demand.  The correlations are far from perfect, however.  Many other factors contribute to the price of commodities such as the value of US currency, political sentiment, and changes in investing strategies.  It is very difficult to predict the price of commodities using simple models, and thus the data is a lot of fun to toy around with.

As you might imagine there is an entire economy surrounding commodity price data.  Many people trade futures contracts on imaginary signals called “technicals” (please be prepared to cite original research if you intend to argue) and are willing to shell out large sums of money to get the latest ticks before the guy in the next suburb over.  The Chicago Mercantile Exchange of course realizes this, and charges a rather hefty sum to the would be software developer who wishes to deliver this data to their users.  The result is that researches like myself are told that rather large sums of money can be exchanged for poorly formatted text files.

Fortunately, commodity futures contract data is also sold to websites who intend to profit off banner adds and is remarkably easy to scrape (it’s literally structured).  I realize this article was supposed to be about scraping price data and not what I ramble about to my girlfriend over diner so I’ll make a nice heading here with the idea that 90% of readers will skip to it.
Scraping the Data

There’s a lot of ways to scrape data from the web.  For old schoolers there’s curl, sed, and awk.  For magical people there’s Perl.  For enterprise there’s com.important.scrapper.business.ScrapperWebPageIntegrationMatchingScrapperService.  And for no good, standards breaking, rouge formatting, try-whatever-the-open-source-community-coughs-up hacker there’s Node.js.  Thus, I used Node.js.

Node.js is quite useful getting stuff done.  I don’t recommend writing your next million line project in it, but for small to medium light projects there’s really no disadvantage.  Some people complain about “callback hell” causing their code to become indented beyond readability (they might consider defining functions) but asynchronous, non-blocking IO code is really quite sexy.  It’s also written in Javascript, which can be quite concise and simple if you’re careful during implementation.

The application I had in mind would be very simple:  HTML is to be fetched, patterns are to be matched, data extracted and then inserted into a database.  Node.js comes with HTTP and HTTPS layers out of the box.  Making a request is simple:

var req = http.request({
     hostname: 'www.penguins.com',
     path: '/fly.php?' + querystring.stringify(yourJSONParams)
}, function(res) {
    if (res.statusCode != 200) {
        console.error('Server responded with code: ' + res.statusCode);
        return done(new Error('Could not retrieve data from server.'), '', symbol);
    }
    var data = '';
    res.setEncoding('utf8');
    res.on('data', function(chunk) {
        data += chunk;
    });

    res.on('end', function() {
        return done('', data.toString(), symbol);
    });
});

req.on('error', function(err) {
    console.error('Problem with request: ', err);
    return done(err, '');
});

req.end();

Don’t worry about ‘done’ and ‘symbol’, they are the containing function’s callback and the current contract symbol respectively.  The juice here is making the HTTP request with some parameters and a callback that handles the results.  After some error checking we add a few listeners within the result callback that append the data (HTML) to the ‘data’ variable and eventually pass it back to the containing function’s callback.  It’s also a good idea to create an error listener for the request.

Although it would be possible to match our data at this point, it usually makes sense to traverse the DOM a bit in case things move around or new stuff shows up.  If we require that our data lives in some DOM element, failure indicates the data no longer exists, which is preferable to a false positive.  For this I brought in the cheerio library which provides core jQuery functionality and promises to be lighter than jsDom.  Usage is quite straightforward:


$ = cheerio.load(html);
$('area', '#someId').each(function() {
    var data = $(this).attr('irresponsibleJavascriptAttributeContainingData');
    var matched = data.match('yourFancyRegex');
});

Here we iterate over each of the area elements within the #someId element and match against a javascript attribute.  You’d be surprised what kind of data you’ll find in these attributes…

The final step is data persistence.  I chose to stuff my price data into a PostreSQL database using the pg module.  I was pretty happy with the process, although if the project grew any bigger I would need to employ aspects to deal with the error handling boilerplate.


/**
 * Save price data into a postgres database.
 * @param err callback
 * @param connectConfig The connection parameters
 * @param symbol the symbol in which to append the data
 * @param price the price data object
 * @param complete callback
 */
exports.savePriceData = function(connectConfig, symbol, price, complete) {
    var errorMsg = 'Error saving price data for symbol ' + symbol;
    pg.connect(connectConfig, function(err, client, done) {
        if (err) {
            console.error(errorMsg, err);
            return complete(err);
        }
        var stream = client.copyFrom('COPY '
            + symbol
            + ' (timestamp, open, high, low, close, volume, interest) FROM STDIN WITH DELIMITER \'|\' NULL \'\'');
        stream.on('close', function() {
            console.log('Data load complete for symbol: ' + symbol);
            return complete();
        });
        stream.on('error', function(err) {
            console.error(errorMsg, err);
            return complete(err);
        });
        for (var i in price) {
            var r = price[i];
            stream.write(i + '|' + r[0] + '|' + r[1] + '|' + r[2] + '|' + r[3] + '|' + r[4] + '|' + r[5] + '\n');
        }
        stream.end();
        done();
        complete();
    });
};

As I have prepared all of the data in the price object, it’s optimal to perform a bulk copy.  The connect function retrieves a connection for us from the pool given a connection configuration.  The callback provides us with an error object, a client for making queries, and a callback that *must* be called to free up the connection.  Note in this case we employ the ‘copyFrom’ function to prepare our bulk copy and write to the resulting ‘stream’ object.  As you can see the error handling gets a cumbersome.

After tying everything together I was very please with how quickly Node.js fetched, processed, and persisted the scrapped data.  It’s quite satisfying to watch log messages scroll rapidly through the console as this asynchronous, non-blocking language executes.  I was able to scrape and persist two dozen contracts in about 10 seconds… and I never had to view a banner ad.

Source:http://cfusting.wordpress.com/2013/10/30/scraping-the-web-for-commodity-futures-contract-data/