Website grabber
Initially, by “grabbing” was implied the process of searching for required information in a large piece of text and splitting it into notional parts. Now, virtually every web grabber (parser) not only searches for all the needed information on websites, but immediately downloads the collected data onto your resources (web-sites, blogs etc.). Typically, web grabbers are used for such purposes:
1. Maintenance of information relevancy. A web grabber is meant to be used if information may become irrelevant in a matter of minutes (for example, for weather or currency rate displaying). In this case manual editing is ineffective or requires high financial expenses. If it is important for you to keep information on your website always up-to-date, and that you don’t have to maintain it yourself, using a web grabber is the best option.
2. Full or partial copying of information from a website with subsequent placement on your resources (for example, for filling an online-store with content, using in satellites etc.). In addition, the grabbed text can be made unique by synonymization or automatic translation (if the text was collected from foreign resources). These tasks are easily solved by a web content grabber (for instance, WordPress grabber).
3. Integration of thematic information from different sources with permanent updating. For example, there are sources that collect all positions and offers from job-hunting or freelance websites in one place. They allow a user to track all new offers regularly and be among the first to respond to an employer’s offer. The news collection from different sources is highly demanded as well.
4. Automatic update of web-pages. A source where information is updated once in a way usually has a low rate of attendance. A user who has already been on such a website has no interest in visiting it once again. These websites are usually called “dead”. But what’s to be done, if you don’t have time to renew the information regularly on your website? The solution is – using the automatic adding of news, articles or any other information from relative sites. This problem can be easily handled by a web grabber as well.
5. Initial filling of a website with information. If your website aims at providing some information (as catalogs full of essays, links, texts, video, images etc.), manual charge of it is quite exhausting and time-consuming. Users will be interested in a website only if the amount of the information exceeds a certain number. Website grabbers (for example, images or video grabber from website) – is a great solution in this case. Usage of web grabbers will allow you to overhaul a competitor at short notice and considerably widen your data catalogs.
And the above list of a website grabber capabilities could go on!
A web grabber will allow you to escape routine tasks, and can notably increase your work efficiency. The website grabber, created on the Datacol basis, can be downloaded at this link.