Web Scraping : To Scrape or Not to Scrape?

Web scraping is on the rise and its legality is being debated. The future of big data could hang in the balance.

I decided that I might want to stop writing about all these successful dot-com businesses and get into the act myself. I mean, how hard could it be, aside from the fact that I have no expertise in any particular vertical, no technological knowledge, and no money? That last was a bit of a problem because I was going to need big data, and big data doesn't come cheap.

So, one day I'm talking to a direct-tech wizard and he says, “Why don't you just find a business you want to be in, find the most successful company, go to their website, and scrape some of their data?”

Scrape? My dad was a house painter. I used to help him during summers. The only scraping I knew was done with a putty knife. But that's what God invented the Internet for. Google turned up endless Web scraping services and I went to one called Automation Anywhere.

Its homepage told me not to try scraping on my own, that I could pay them as little as $1,995 for a program that would have me scraping away in minutes with no programming expertise. A video showed me how. Suppose I wanted to locate all the assisted living facilities in Detroit? (Bedpans! There's a wide-open Web business!) Automation Anywhere showed me how I could request a data pattern—name, address, phone, and service area of targets—apply their program to a rehab facility listing, and minutes later be in possession of tidy customer list on a spreadsheet. A box popped up asking if I had any questions for a live account manager. I did.

“I'm interested in this, but is it totally legal?” I asked Shine, the account rep.

Shine was slow to respond and came back disappointingly noncommittal: “You need to install the software at your end. Hence, you will need to check at your end for legal documents for the website.”

Shine had obviously been reading the same European news sites that I had. Last year Irish airline Ryanair filed suit against PR Aviation, a Dutch airfare comparison site, charging it with copyright infringement and breach of contract for scraping flight data from its site. The Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) dismissed the suit, saying the scraping amounted to “normal use” of a website. However, the ECJ did potentially leave the door open for businesses with unprotected databases, such as Ryanair, to establish contractual limitations on use of their databases by third parties. That opening, should it be entered into by airlines, might have businesses such as Expedia, Orbitz, and Priceline reimagining their business plans.

And it could have any other businesses that load up third-party data files through scraping activities doing the same. The reality, however, is that that's a big “and.”

“The airlines have been halfway successful taking travel agents to court, but it can take five years and then they lose,” said Gus Cunningham, CEO of ScrapeSentry, one of only “three and a half” companies, in his words, that block scrapers from websites.

Professional scrapers are not only out-front and plentiful—as the Google search demonstrated—they're also nimble and expensive to chase away. Basically, Cunningham said, it's a matter of stopping scrapers at the website door among the airlines, e-coms, real estate sites, and online gambling companies that are scraped the most. Cunningham's company monitors inbound Web traffic and uses an analysis engine to block suspect visitors per parameters set down by clients. ScanSentry has a nine-year-old database that helps it identify bad actors, much like Interpol with its criminal database. Then a human element must enter the process.

Some of Cunningham's clients feed bogus information to competitors identified as scrapers to ferret them out. In many cases, though, they opt to turn their heads. “Airlines have some flights where they just want to get as many butts as they can in the seats, so they won't concentrate their blocking efforts on those. They'll concentrate on the routes that are always jammed,” Cunningham said.

Unlike botnets that steal money by, say, serving bogus websites to siphon off programmatic ad dollars, scraping is not overtly criminal. In the wide sphere of digital commerce, it's probably most common that the scrap-ee is also a scrap-er. How vigilant vulnerable industries become, and how protective courts and law enforcement agencies grow, will depend on how much scraping activity increases. Cunningham said it's growing fast. More than one fifth of visitors to client websites last year were scrapers, according to a ScanSentry study. Among travel companies, meanwhile, scrapers doubled from 15% in 2013 to 33% last year.

“And,” Cunningham noted, “It is stealing.”

Source: http://www.dmnews.com/direct-line-blog/to-scrape-or-not-to-scrape/article/422662/

Data Scraping - About Hand Scraped Flooring

Data Scraping - About Hand Scraped Flooring

Hand scraped hardwood flooring is one of the best floors that you can install in your house.

Advantages of Hand Scraped Hardwood Flooring

The product comes with a number of advantages which include:

Antique and modern technology: The floor professionally brings out the best elements of both antique and modern technology. The modern elements are in the quality of the product.

Unique patterns: Who doesn't want to be unique? These floors allow you to create your unique design. If you are going to use a machine, all you need to do is to set the machine such that it creates the pattern that you want. If the floor will be scraped by a craftsman, you should ask the craftsman to craft your desired pattern.

Character: The different depths in the floor provide you with character and color that you can't find in other types of floors. As the sun changes its angle during the day, the nooks and valleys on the board lit differently thus providing your board with an endless rich appearance.

Durability: Experts have been able to show that hand-scraped hardwood retains its look for a long time. If your kid or pet hits the floor, the dent just blends with the rest of the character making it hard for people to tell that there is a dent.

Making the floors shine again

Although, the scraped floors are designed to look worn and aged, they are made from modern wood which needs to be taken care of in order to retain its original look.

To make the floors shine again you need to remove all the dust and dirt that might be causing the wood to look dull.

After doing this you should mix 1 gallon of warm water with ½ teaspoon of dishwashing detergent and use it to clean the surface of the floor. The aim of doing this is to remove any stains that might be on the floor. When you complete doing this you should dampen the piece of cloth with club soda and then use another piece of cloth to buff the wood until it shines.

Conclusion

This is what you need to know about hand scraped hardwood flooring. When cleaning the floors you should avoid using oil based soaps as they dull the surface making your efforts worthless.

If the above method of shining the floor doesn't work, you should mix one part white vinegar and one part of cooking oil and use it to clean the floor.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?About-Hand-Scraped-Flooring&id=8990255

Web Scraping Services : Data Discovery vs. Data Extraction

Looking at screen-scraping at a simplified level, there are two primary stages involved: data discovery and data extraction. Data discovery deals with navigating a web site to arrive at the pages containing the data you want, and data extraction deals with actually pulling that data off of those pages. Generally when people think of screen-scraping they focus on the data extraction portion of the process, but my experience has been that data discovery is often the more difficult of the two.

The data discovery step in screen-scraping might be as simple as requesting a single URL. For example, you might just need to go to the home page of a site and extract out the latest news headlines. On the other side of the spectrum, data discovery may involve logging in to a web site, traversing a series of pages in order to get needed cookies, submitting a POST request on a search form, traversing through search results pages, and finally following all of the "details" links within the search results pages to get to the data you're actually after. In cases of the former a simple Perl script would often work just fine. For anything much more complex than that, though, a commercial screen-scraping tool can be an incredible time-saver. Especially for sites that require logging in, writing code to handle screen-scraping can be a nightmare when it comes to dealing with cookies and such.

In the data extraction phase you've already arrived at the page containing the data you're interested in, and you now need to pull it out of the HTML. Traditionally this has typically involved creating a series of regular expressions that match the pieces of the page you want (e.g., URL's and link titles). Regular expressions can be a bit complex to deal with, so most screen-scraping applications will hide these details from you, even though they may use regular expressions behind the scenes.

As an addendum, I should probably mention a third phase that is often ignored, and that is, what do you do with the data once you've extracted it? Common examples include writing the data to a CSV or XML file, or saving it to a database. In the case of a live web site you might even scrape the information and display it in the user's web browser in real-time. When shopping around for a screen-scraping tool you should make sure that it gives you the flexibility you need to work with the data once it's been extracted.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Discovery-vs.-Data-Extraction&id=165396

Getting Data from the Web Scraping

You’ve tried everything else, and you haven’t managed to get your hands on the data you want. You’ve found the data on the web, but, alas — no download options are available and copy-paste has failed you. Fear not, there may still be a way to get the data out. For example you can:

•    Get data from web-based APIs, such as interfaces provided by online databases and many modern web applications (including Twitter, Facebook and many others). This is a fantastic way to access government or commercial data, as well as data from social media sites.

•    Extract data from PDFs. This is very difficult, as PDF is a language for printers and does not retain much information on the structure of the data that is displayed within a document. Extracting information from PDFs is beyond the scope of this book, but there are some tools and tutorials that may help you do it.

•    Screen scrape web sites. During screen scraping, you’re extracting structured content from a normal web page with the help of a scraping utility or by writing a small piece of code. While this method is very powerful and can be used in many places, it requires a bit of understanding about how the web works.

With all those great technical options, don’t forget the simple options: often it is worth to spend some time searching for a file with machine-readable data or to call the institution which is holding the data you want.

In this chapter we walk through a very basic example of scraping data from an HTML web page.

What is machine-readable data?

The goal for most of these methods is to get access to machine-readable data. Machine readable data is created for processing by a computer, instead of the presentation to a human user. The structure of such data relates to contained information, and not the way it is displayed eventually. Examples of easily machine-readable formats include CSV, XML, JSON and Excel files, while formats like Word documents, HTML pages and PDF files are more concerned with the visual layout of the information. PDF for example is a language which talks directly to your printer, it’s concerned with position of lines and dots on a page, rather than distinguishable characters.

Scraping web sites: what for?

Everyone has done this: you go to a web site, see an interesting table and try to copy it over to Excel so you can add some numbers up or store it for later. Yet this often does not really work, or the information you want is spread across a large number of web sites. Copying by hand can quickly become very tedious, so it makes sense to use a bit of code to do it.

The advantage of scraping is that you can do it with virtually any web site — from weather forecasts to government spending, even if that site does not have an API for raw data access.

What you can and cannot scrape

There are, of course, limits to what can be scraped. Some factors that make it harder to scrape a site include:

•    Badly formatted HTML code with little or no structural information e.g. older government websites.

•    Authentication systems that are supposed to prevent automatic access e.g. CAPTCHA codes and paywalls.

•    Session-based systems that use browser cookies to keep track of what the user has been doing.

•    A lack of complete item listings and possibilities for wildcard search.

•    Blocking of bulk access by the server administrators.

Another set of limitations are legal barriers: some countries recognize database rights, which may limit your right to re-use information that has been published online. Sometimes, you can choose to ignore the license and do it anyway — depending on your jurisdiction, you may have special rights as a journalist. Scraping freely available Government data should be fine, but you may wish to double check before you publish. Commercial organizations — and certain NGOs — react with less tolerance and may try to claim that you’re “sabotaging” their systems. Other information may infringe the privacy of individuals and thereby violate data privacy laws or professional ethics.

Tools that help you scrape

There are many programs that can be used to extract bulk information from a web site, including browser extensions and some web services. Depending on your browser, tools like Readability (which helps extract text from a page) or DownThemAll (which allows you to download many files at once) will help you automate some tedious tasks, while Chrome’s Scraper extension was explicitly built to extract tables from web sites. Developer extensions like FireBug (for Firefox, the same thing is already included in Chrome, Safari and IE) let you track exactly how a web site is structured and what communications happen between your browser and the server.

ScraperWiki is a web site that allows you to code scrapers in a number of different programming languages, including Python, Ruby and PHP. If you want to get started with scraping without the hassle of setting up a programming environment on your computer, this is the way to go. Other web services, such as Google Spreadsheets and Yahoo! Pipes also allow you to perform some extraction from other web sites.

How does a web scraper work?

Web scrapers are usually small pieces of code written in a programming language such as Python, Ruby or PHP. Choosing the right language is largely a question of which community you have access to: if there is someone in your newsroom or city already working with one of these languages, then it makes sense to adopt the same language.

While some of the click-and-point scraping tools mentioned before may be helpful to get started, the real complexity involved in scraping a web site is in addressing the right pages and the right elements within these pages to extract the desired information. These tasks aren’t about programming, but understanding the structure of the web site and database.

When displaying a web site, your browser will almost always make use of two technologies: HTTP is a way for it to communicate with the server and to request specific resource, such as documents, images or videos. HTML is the language in which web sites are composed.

The anatomy of a web page

Any HTML page is structured as a hierarchy of boxes (which are defined by HTML “tags”). A large box will contain many smaller ones — for example a table that has many smaller divisions: rows and cells. There are many types of tags that perform different functions — some produce boxes, others tables, images or links. Tags can also have additional properties (e.g. they can be unique identifiers) and can belong to groups called ‘classes’, which makes it possible to target and capture individual elements within a document. Selecting the appropriate elements this way and extracting their content is the key to writing a scraper.

Viewing the elements in a web page: everything can be broken up into boxes within boxes.

To scrape web pages, you’ll need to learn a bit about the different types of elements that can be in an HTML document. For example, the <table> element wraps a whole table, which has <tr> (table row) elements for its rows, which in turn contain <td> (table data) for each cell. The most common element type you will encounter is <div>, which can basically mean any block of content. The easiest way to get a feel for these elements is by using the developer toolbar in your browser: they will allow you to hover over any part of a web page and see what the underlying code is.

Tags work like book ends, marking the start and the end of a unit. For example <em> signifies the start of an italicized or emphasized piece of text and </em> signifies the end of that section. Easy.

Figure 57. The International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) portal (news.iaea.org)

An example: scraping nuclear incidents with Python

NEWS is the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) portal on world-wide radiation incidents (and a strong contender for membership in the Weird Title Club!). The web page lists incidents in a simple, blog-like site that can be easily scraped.

To start, create a new Python scraper on ScraperWiki and you will be presented with a text area that is mostly empty, except for some scaffolding code. In another browser window, open the IAEA site and open the developer toolbar in your browser. In the “Elements” view, try to find the HTML element for one of the news item titles. Your browser’s developer toolbar helps you connect elements on the web page with the underlying HTML code.

Investigating this page will reveal that the titles are <h4> elements within a <table>. Each event is a <tr> row, which also contains a description and a date. If we want to extract the titles of all events, we should find a way to select each row in the table sequentially, while fetching all the text within the title elements.

In order to turn this process into code, we need to make ourselves aware of all the steps involved. To get a feeling for the kind of steps required, let’s play a simple game: In your ScraperWiki window, try to write up individual instructions for yourself, for each thing you are going to do while writing this scraper, like steps in a recipe (prefix each line with a hash sign to tell Python that this not real computer code). For example:

# Look for all rows in the table

# Unicorn must not overflow on left side.

Try to be as precise as you can and don’t assume that the program knows anything about the page you’re attempting to scrape.

Once you’ve written down some pseudo-code, let’s compare this to the essential code for our first scraper:

import scraperwiki

In this first section, we’re importing existing functionality from libraries — snippets of pre-written code. scraperwiki will give us the ability to download web sites, while lxml is a tool for the structured analysis of HTML documents. Good news: if you are writing a Python scraper with ScraperWiki, these two lines will always be the same.

doc_text = scraperwiki.scrape(url)

doc = html.fromstring(doc_text)

Next, the code makes a name (variable): url, and assigns the URL of the IAEA page as its value. This tells the scraper that this thing exists and we want to pay attention to it. Note that the URL itself is in quotes as it is not part of the program code but a string, a sequence of characters.

We then use the url variable as input to a function, scraperwiki.scrape. A function will provide some defined job — in this case it’ll download a web page. When it’s finished, it’ll assign its output to another variable, doc_text. doc_text will now hold the actual text of the website — not the visual form you see in your browser, but the source code, including all the tags. Since this form is not very easy to parse, we’ll use another function, html.fromstring, to generate a special representation where we can easily address elements, the so-called document object model (DOM).

In this final step, we use the DOM to find each row in our table and extract the event’s title from its header. Two new concepts are used: the for loop and element selection (.cssselect). The for loop essentially does what its name implies; it will traverse a list of items, assigning each a temporary alias (row in this case) and then run any indented instructions for each item.

The other new concept, element selection, is making use of a special language to find elements in the document. CSS selectors are normally used to add layout information to HTML elements and can be used to precisely pick an element out of a page. In this case (Line. 6) we’re selecting #tblEvents tr which will match each <tr> within the table element with the ID tblEvents (the hash simply signifies ID). Note that this will return a list of <tr> elements.

As can be seen on the next line (Line. 7), where we’re applying another selector to find any <a> (which is a hyperlink) within a <h4> (a title). Here we only want to look at a single element (there’s just one title per row), so we have to pop it off the top of the list returned by our selector with the .pop() function.

Note that some elements in the DOM contain actual text, i.e. text that is not part of any markup language, which we can access using the [element].text syntax seen on line 8. Finally, in line 9, we’re printing that text to the ScraperWiki console. If you hit run in your scraper, the smaller window should now start listing the event’s names from the IAEA web site.

You can now see a basic scraper operating: it downloads the web page, transforms it into the DOM form and then allows you to pick and extract certain content. Given this skeleton, you can try and solve some of the remaining problems using the ScraperWiki and Python documentation:

•    Can you find the address for the link in each event’s title?

•    Can you select the small box that contains the date and place by using its CSS class name and extract the element’s text?

•    ScraperWiki offers a small database to each scraper so you can store the results; copy the relevant example from their docs and adapt it so it will save the event titles, links and dates.

•    The event list has many pages; can you scrape multiple pages to get historic events as well?

As you’re trying to solve these challenges, have a look around ScraperWiki: there are many useful examples in the existing scrapers — and quite often, the data is pretty exciting, too. This way, you don’t need to start off your scraper from scratch: just choose one that is similar, fork it and adapt to your problem.

Source: http://datajournalismhandbook.org/1.0/en/getting_data_3.html

Data Scraping Services - Web Scraping Video Tutorial Collection for All Programming Language

Web scraping is a mechanism in which request made to website URL to get  HTML Document text and that text then parsed to extract data from the HTML codes.  Website scraping for data is a generalize approach and can be implemented in any programming language like PHP, Java, C#, Python and many other.

There are many Web scraping software available in market using which you can extract data with no coding knowledge. In many case the scraping doesn’t help due to custom crawling flow for data scraping and in that case you have to make your own web scraping application in one of the programming language you know. In this post I have collected scraping video tutorials for all programming language.

I mostly familiar with web scraping using PHP, C# and some other scraping tools and providing web scraping service.  If you have any scraping requirement send me your requirements and I will get back with sample data scrape and best price.

Web Scraping Using PHP

You can do web scraping in PHP using CURL library and Simple HTML DOM parsing library.  PHP function file_get_content() can also be useful for making web request. One drawback of scraping using PHP is it can’t parse JavaScript so ajax based scraping can’t be possible using PHP.

Web Scraping Using C#

There are many library available in .Net for HTML parsing and data scraping. I have used Web Browser control and HTML Agility Pack for data extraction in .Net using C#

I have didn’t done web scraping in Java, PERL and Python. I had learned web scraping in node.js using Casper.JS and Phantom.JS library. But I thought below tutorial will be helpful for some one who are Java and Python based.

Web Scraping Using Jsoup in Java

Scraping Stock Data Using Python

Develop Web Crawler Using PERL

Web Scraping Using Node.Js

If you find any other good web scraping video tutorial then you can share the link in comment so other readesr get benefit form that.

Source: http://webdata-scraping.com/web-scraping-video-tutorial-collection-programming-language/

Web Scraping Services - Extracting Business Data You Need

Would you like to have someone collect, extract, find or scrap contact details, stats, list, extract data, or information from websites, online stores, directories, and more?

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At Hi-Tech BPO Services we are helping global businesses build their own database, mailing list, generate leads, and get access to vast resources of unstructured data available on World Wide Web.

We scrape data from various sources such as websites, blogs, podcasts, and online directories; and convert them into structured formats such as excel, csv, access, text, My SQL using automated and manual scraping technologies. Through our web data scraping services, we crawl through websites and gather sales leads, competitor’s product details, new offers, pricing methodologies, and various other types of information from the web.

Our web scraping services scrape data such as name, email, phone number, address, country, state, city, product, and pricing details among others.

Areas of Expertise in Web Scraping:

•    Contact Details
•    Statistics data from websites
•    Classifieds
•    Real estate portals
•    Social networking sites
•    Government portals
•    Entertainment sites
•    Auction portals
•    Business directories
•    Job portals
•    Email ids and Profiles
•    URLs in an excel spreadsheet
•    Market place portals
•    Search engine and SEO
•    Accessories portals
•    News portals
•    Online shopping portals
•    Hotels and restaurant
•    Event portals
•    Lead generation

Industries we Serve:

Our web scraping services are suitable for industries including real estate, information technology, university, hospital, medicine, property, restaurant, hotels, banking, finance, insurance, media/entertainment, automobiles, marketing, human resources, manufacturing, healthcare, academics, travel, telecommunication and many more.

Why Hi-Tech BPO Services for Web Scraping?

•    Skilled and committed scraping experts
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Source: http://www.hitechbposervices.com/web-scraping.php

Which language is the most flexible for scraping websites?

3 down vote favorite

I'm new to programming. I know a little python and a little objective c, and I've been going through tutorials for each. Then it occurred to me, I need to know which language is more flexible (python, obj c, something else) for screen scraping a website for content.

What do I mean by "flexible"?

Well, ideally, I need something that will be easy to refactor and tweak for similar projects. I'm trying to avoid doing a lot of re-writing (well, re-coding) if I wanted to switch some of the variables in the program (i.e., the website to be scraped, the content to fetch, etc).

Anyways, if you could please give me your opinion, that would be great. Oh, and if you know any existing frameworks for the language you recommend, please share. (I know a little about Selenium and BeautifulSoup for python already).

4 Answers

I recently wrote a relatively complex web scraper to harvest a TON of data. It had to do some relatively complex parsing, I needed it to stuff it into a database, etc. I'm C# programmer now and formerly a Perl guy.

I wrote my original scraper using Python. I started on a Thursday and by Sunday morning I was harvesting over about a million scores from a show horse site. I used Python and SQLlite because they were fast.

HOWEVER, as I started putting together programs to regularly keep the data updated and to populate the SQL Server that would backend my MVC3 application, I kept hitting snags and gaps in my Python knowledge.

In the end, I completely rewrote the scraper/parser in C# using the HtmlAgilityPack and it works better than before (and just about as fast).

Because I KNEW THE LANGUAGE and the environment so much better I was able to add better database support, better logging, better error handling, etc. etc.

So... short answer.. Python was the fastest to market with a "good enough for now" solution, but the language I know best (C#) was the best long-term solution.

EDIT: I used BeautifulSoup for my original crawler written in Python.

5 down vote

The most flexible is the one that you're most familiar with.

Personally, I use Python for almost all of my utilities. For scraping, I find that its functionality specific to parsing and string manipulation requires little code, is fast and there are a ton of examples out there (strong community). Chances are that someone's already written whatever you're trying to do already, or there's at least something along the same lines that needs very little refactoring.

1 down vote

I think its safe to say that Python is a better place to start than Objective C. Honestly, just about any language meets the "flexible" requirement. All you need is well thought out configuration parameters. Also, a dynamic language like Python can go a long way in increasing flexibility, provided that you account for runtime type errors.

1 down vote

I recently wrote a very simple web-scraper; I chose Common Lisp as I'm learning the language.

On the basis of my experience - both of the language and the availability of help from experienced Lispers - I recommend investigating Common Lisp for your purpose.

There are excellent XML-parsing libraries available for CL, as well as libraries for parsing invalid HTML, which you'll need unless the sites you're parsing consist solely of valid XHTML.

Also, Common Lisp is a good language in which to implement DSLs; a DSL for web-scraping may be a solution to your requirement for flexibility & re-use.

Source: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/74998/which-language-is-the-most-flexible-for-scraping-websites/75006#75006

5 tips for scraping big websites

Scraping bigger websites can be a challenge if done the wrong way.

Bigger websites would have more data, more security and more pages. We’ve learned a lot from our years of crawling such large complex websites, and these tips could help solve some of your challenges

1. Cache pages visited for scraping

When scraping big websites, its always a good idea to cache the data you have already downloaded. So you don’t have to put load on the website again, in case you have start over again or that page is required again during scraping. Its effortless to cache to a key value store like redis.But Databases and filesystem caches are also good.

2. Don’t flood the website with large number of parallel requests , take it slow

Big websites posses algorithms to detect webscraping, large number of parallel requests from the same ip address will identify you as a Denial Of Service Attack on their website, and blacklist your IPs immediately. A better idea is to time your requests properly one after the other, giving it some human behavior. Oh!.. but scraping like that will take you ages. So balance requests using the average response time of the websites, and play around with the number of parallel requests to the website to get the right number.

3. Store the URLs that you have already fetched

You may want to keep a list of URLs you have already fetched, in a database or a key value store. What would you do if you scraper crashes after scraping 70% of the website. If you need to complete the remaining 30%, with out this list of URLs, you’ll waste a lot of time and bandwidth. Make sure you store this list of URLs

somewhere permanent, till you have all the required data. This could also be combined with the cache. This way, you’ll be able to resume scraping.

4. Split scraping into different phases

Its easier and safer if you split the scraping into multiple smaller phases. For example, you could split scraping a huge site into two. One for gathering links to the pages from which you need to extract data and another for downloading these pages to scrape content.

5. Take only whats required

Don’t grab or follow every link unless its required. You can define a proper navigation scheme to make the scraper visit only the pages required. Its always tempting to grab everything, but its just a waste of bandwidth, time and storage.

Source: http://learn.scrapehero.com/5-tips-for-scraping-big-websites/

Hard-Scraped Hardwood Flooring: Restoration of History

Throughout History hardwood flooring has undergone dramatic changes from the meticulous hard-scraped hardwood polished floors of majestic plantations of the Deep South, to modern day technology providing maintenance free wood flooring designed for comfort and appearance. The hand-scraped hardwood floors of the South, depicted charm with old rustic nature and character that was often associated with this time era. To date, hand-scraped hardwood flooring is being revitalized and used in up-scale homes and places of businesses to restore the old country charm that once faded into oblivion.

As the name implies, hand-scraped flooring involves the retexturing the top layer of flooring material by various methods in an attempts to mimic the rustic appearance of flooring in yesteryears. Depending on the degree of texture required, hand scraping hardwood material is often accomplished by highly skilled craftsmen with specialized tools and years of experience perfecting this procedure. When properly done, hand-scraped hardwood floors add texture, richness and uniqueness not offered in any similar hardwood flooring product.

Rooted with history, these types of floors are available in finished or unfinished surfaces. The majority of the individuals selecting hand-scraped hardwood flooring elect a prefinished floor to reduce costs per square foot in installation and finishing labor charges, allowing for budget guidelines to bend, not break. As expected, hand-scraped flooring is expensive and depending on the grade and finish selected, can range from $15-40$ per square foot and beyond for material only. Preparation of the material is labor intensive adding to the overall cost per square foot dramatically. Recommended professional installation can and often does increase the cost per square foot as well, placing this method of hardwood flooring well out of reach of the average hardwood floor purchaser.

With numerous selections of hand-scraped finishes available, each finish is designed to bring out a different appearance making it a one-of-a-kind work of art. These numerous finish selections include:

• Time worn aged, dark coloring stain application bringing out grain characteristics

• Wire brushed, providing a highlighted "grainy" effect with obvious rough texture

• Hand sculpted, smoother distressed uniform appearance

• French Bleed, staining of edges and side joints with a much darker stain to give a bleeding effect to the wood

• Hand Hewn or Rough Sawn, with visible and noticeable saw marks

Regardless of the selection made, scraped flooring cannot be compared to any other available flooring material based on durability, strength and visual appearance. Limited by only the imagination and creativity, several wood species can be used to create unusual floor patterns, highlighting main focal points of personal libraries and art collections.

The precise process utilized in the creation of scraped floors projects a custom look with deep color and subtle warm highlights. With radiant natural light reflecting off this type of floor, the effect of beauty and depth is radiated in a fashion that fills the room with solitude and serenity encompassing all that enter. Hand-scraped hardwood floors speak of the past, a time of decent, a time or war and ambiguity towards other races and the blood- shed so that all men could be treated as equals. More than exquisite flooring, hand-scraped hardwood flooring is the restoration of History.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Hard-Scraped-Hardwood-Flooring:-Restoration-of-History&id=6333218

The Features of the "Holographic Meridian Scraping Therapy"

1. Systematic nature: Brief introduction to the knowledge of viscera, meridians and points in traditional Chinese medicine, theory of holographic diagnosis and treatment; preliminary discussion of the treatment and health care mechanism of scraping therapy; systemat­ic introduction to the concrete methods of the holographic meridian scraping therapy; enumerating a host of therapeutic methods of scraping for disorders in both Chinese and Western medicine to em­body a combination of disease differentiation and syndrome differen­tiation; and summarizing the health care scraping methods. It is a practical handbook of gua sha.

2. Scientific: Applying the theories of Chinese and Western medicine to explain the health care and treatment mechanism and clinical applications of scraping therapy; introducing in detail the practical manipulations, items for attention, and indications and contraindications of the scraping therapy. Here are introduced repre­sentative diseases in different clinical departments, for which scrap­ing therapy has a better curative effect and the therapeutic methods of scraping for these diseases. Stress is placed on disease differentia­tion in Western medicine and syndrome differentiation in Chinese medicine, which should be combined in practical application.

Although there are more than 140,000 kinds of disease known to modem medicine, all diseases are related to dysfunction of the 14 meridians and internal organs, according to traditional Chinese med­icine. The object of scraping therapy is to correct the disharmony in the meridians and internal organs to recover the normal bodily func­tions. Thus, the scraping of a set of meridian points can be used to treat many diseases. In the section on clinical application only about 100 kinds of common diseases are discussed, although the actual number is much more than that. For easy reference the "Index of Diseases and Symptoms" is appended at the back of the book.

3. Practical: Using simple language and plenty of pictures and diagrams to guarantee that readers can easily leam, memorize and apply the principles of scraping therapy. As long as they master the methods explained in Chapter Three, readers without any medical knowledge can apply scraping therapy to themselves or others, with reference to the pictures in Chapters Four and Five. Besides scraping therapy, herbal treatment for each disease or syndrome is explained and may be used in combination with the scraping techniques.

Referring to the Holographic Meridian Hand Diagnosis and pic­tures at the back of the book will enhance accuracy of diagnosis and increase the effectiveness of scraping therapy.

Since the first publication and distribution of the Chinese edition of the book in July 1995, it has been welcomed by both medical specialists and lay people. In March 1996 this book was republished and adopted as a textbook by the School for Advanced Studies of Traditional Chinese Medicine affiliated to the Institute of the Acu­puncture and Moxibustion of the China Academy of Traditional Chi­nese Medicine.

In order to bring this health care method to more and more peo­ple and to make traditional Chinese medicine better appreciated They have modified and replenished this book in the spirit of constant im­provement. They hope that they may make a contribution to the health care of mankind with this natural therapy which has no side-effects and causes no pollution.

They hope that the Holographic Meridian Scraping Therapy can help the health and happiness of more and more families in the world.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?The-Features-of-the-Holographic-Meridian-Scraping-Therapy&id=5005031

Dapper: The Scraper for the Common Man

Sometimes, especially with Web 2.0 companies, jargon can get a little bit out of hand. When someone says that a service allows you to "build an API for any website", it can be a bit difficult to understand what that really means.

However, put simply, Dapper is a scraper. Nothing more. It allows you to scrape content from a Web page and convert it into an XML document that can be easily used at another location. Though you won't find the words "scrape" or "scraper" anywhere on its site, that is exactly what it does.

What separates Dapper from other scrapers, both legitimate and illegitimate, is that it is both free and easy to use. In short, it makes the process of setting up the scraper simple enough for your every day Internet user. While one has never needed to be a geek to scrape RSS feeds, now the technologically impaired can scrape content from any site, even those that don't publish RSS feeds.

Though the TechCrunch profile of the service says that Dapper "aims to offer some legitimate, valuable services and set up a means to respect copyright" others are expressing concern about the potential for copyright violations, especially by spam bloggers.

Either way though, both the cause for concern and the potential dangers are very, very real.

What is Dapper

When a user goes to create a new "Dapp", he or she first needs to provide a series of links. These links must be on the same domain and in similar formats (IE: Google searches for different terms or different blog posts on a single site) for the service to work. Once the links have been defined, the user is then taken to a GUI where they pick out fields.

In a simple example where the user would create their own RSS feed for a blog, the post title might be one field, perhaps called "post title" and the body would be a second, perhaps called "post body". Dapper, much like the service social bookmarking Clipmarks, is able able to intelligently select blocks of text on a Web page, making it easy to ensure that the entire post body is selected and that extraneous information is omitted.

Once the fields have been selected, the user can then either create groups based upon those fields or simply save the dapp for future use. Once the Dapp has been saved, they can then use it to create both raw XML data, an RSS feed, a Google Gadget or any number of other output files that can be easily used in other services.

If you are interested in viewing a demo of Dapper, you can do so at this link.

There is little doubt that Dapper is an impressive service. It has taken the black art of scraping and made it into a simple, easy-to-use application that just about anyone can pick up. Though it might take a few tries to create a working Dapp, and certainly spending some time reading up on the service is required, most will find it easy to use, especially when compared to the alternatives.

However, it's this ease of use that has so many worried. Though scrapers have been around for many years, they have been either difficult to use or expensive. Dapper's power, when combined with its price tag and sheer ease of use, has many wondered that it might be ushering not a new age for the Web, but a new age for scrapers seeking to abuse other's hard work.

Cause for Concern

While being easy to use or free is not necessarily a problem in and of itself, in the rush to enable users to make an API for any site, they forget that many sites don't have one or restrict access to their APIs for very good reasons. RSS scraping is perhaps the biggest copyright issue bloggers face. It enables a plagiarist or spammer to not only steal all of the content on the blog right then, but also all of the content that will be posted in the future. This is a huge concern for many bloggers, especially those concerned about performing well in the search engines.

This has prompted many blogs to either disable their RSS feeds, truncate them or move them to a feed monitoring service such as Feedburner. However, if users can simply create their own RSS feeds with ease, these protections are circumvented and Webmasters lose control over their content.

Even with potential copyright abuse issues aside, Dapper creates potential problems for Webmasters. It bypasses the usual metrics that site owners have. A user who reads a site, or large portions of it, through a Dapp will not be counted in either the feed statistics or, depending on how Dapper is set up, even in the site's logs. All the while, the site is spending precious resources to feed the Dapp, taking money out of the Webmaster's pocket.

This combination of greater expense, less traffic and less accurate metrics can be dangerous to Webmasters who are working to get accurate traffic counts, visitor feedback or revenue.

Worse still, Dapp users also bypass any ads or other monetization tools that might be included in the site or the original RSS feed. This has a direct impact on sites trying to either turn a profit or, like this one, recoup some of the costs of hosting.

Despite this, it's the copyright concerns that reign supreme. Though screen scraping is not necessarily an evil technology, it is the sinister uses that have gotten the most attention and, sadly, seem to be the most common, especially in regards to blogs.

Even if the makers of Dapper is aiming to add copyright protection at a later date, the service is fully functional today and, though the FAQ states that they will "comply with any verified request by the lawful owner of the content to cease using his content," there is no opt-out procedure, no DMCA information on the United States Copyright Office Web site, no information on how to prevent Dapper from accessing your site and nothing but a contact page to get in touch with the makers of the service.

(Note: An email sent to the makers of Dapper on the 22nd has, as of yet, gone unanswered)

In addition to creating a potential copyright nightmare for Webmasters the site seems to be setting itself up for a lawsuit. In addition to not being DMCA Safe Harbor compliant (PDF), thus opening it up to copyright infringement lawsuits directly, the service seems to be vulnerable to a lawsuit under the MGM v. Grokster case, which found that service providers can be sued for infringement conducted by its users if they fail an "inducement" test. Sadly for Dapper, simply saying that it is the user's responsibility is not adequate to pass such a test, as Grokster found out. The failure to offer filtering technology and encouragement to create API's for "any" site are both likely strikes against Dapper in that regard.

To make matters more grim, copyright is not the only issue scrapers have to worry about, as one pair of lawyers put it, there are at least four different different legal theories that make scraping illegal including the computer fraud and abuse act, trespass against chattels and breach of contract. All in all, copyright is practically the least of Dapper's problems.

When it's all said and done, there is a lot of room for concern, not just on the part of Webmasters that might be affected by Dapper or its users, but also its makers. These intellectual property and other legal issues could easily sink the entire project.

Conclusions

It is obvious that a lot of time and effort went into creating Dapper. It's a very powerful, easy to use service that opens up interesting possibilities. I would hate to see the service used for ill and I would hate even worse to see all of the hard work that went into it lost because of intellectual property issues.

However, in its current incarnation, it seems likely that Dapper is going to encounter significant resistance on the IP front. There is little, if any protection or regard for intellectual property under the current system and, once bloggers find out that their content is being syndicated without their permission by the service, many are likely to start raising a fuss.

Even though Dapper has gotten rave reviews in the Web 2.0 community, it seems likely that traditional bloggers and other Web site owners will have serious objections to it. Those people, sadly, most likely have never heard of Dapper at this point.

With that being said, it is a service everyone needs to make note of. The one thing that is for certain is that it will be in the news again. The only question is what light will it be under.

Source: https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2006/08/24/dapper-the-scraper-for-the-common-man/

Web Data Extraction Solutions for business Automation

Your business today is driven purely and solely by information. This vital component is carved out from data scraped from relevant sources, cleansed and compiled to form the crux of your enterprise analytics plan. Therefore, following a manual practice for Data Extraction often makes it prone to errors which may be detrimental to the health of your business. Various Web Data Extraction Solutions therefore are made available which help to not only automate Website Data Scraping, but in the process also help in the automation of several business processes.  Let us take a look at some of these business processes:

Execute Data Mining

One of the most obvious usages of the data extractor tools is the function of Web Data Mining, which, if done through manual processes is neither cost-effective nor accurate. Therefore, data extraction solutions provide simple and convenient point and click data extraction interfaces. Moreover, these do not require any additional programming knowledge.

Validate Data accuracy

Web Site Data scraping tools use advanced technology to not only extract data, but also validate their accuracy. This is particularly beneficial for businesses which are involved in background screening and credit reporting activities. Automating the process of validating records helps in increasing turnaround time of the business and ensures accuracy, two of the most crucial criteria for achieving success in their line of business.

Be Price Wise

Organizations are always involved in studying the price dynamics in order to better understand the challenges and areas of opportunities. Your awareness on these helps you to provide more competitive pricing for your products and services. Data extraction solutions are equipped with pricing intelligence technology that helps to collect data on the price that your customer’s expect, their feedback on your products and services and helps you develop insights on products being launched by competitors, their price and availability. This automated process therefore ensures the following things for your business:

•    Increased market – share

•    Enhanced product strategy

•    Informed decisions

Be Compliance Ready

If yours is a financial services firm, you must have often found it to be a major challenge to keep yourself abreast of the compliance and risk factors. Tracking the myriad watch lists, sanction lists and federal and state regulations, available on the web is not only time taking but also an expensive endeavor. The automated Web Data Mining tools ensure that you are now able to do this without impacting the time and money aspect of your business. You are now ensured of compliance with all regulations and sanction lists that are updated on a regular basis. Consequently, your business can also breathe easy with a reduced exposure to financial fraud and identity theft.

Easy Access to Customer Feedback

Your customers are in a way the real owners of your business. They define the way you need to design your product strategy. It is therefore crucial that you need to listen to what they have to say.  The automated Web extraction solutions with their ability to tap into several relevant sources help you to get access to customer sentiments and feedback on your products and services. This is a vital aspect in your organization's growth as it helps you to tackle three important factors:

•    Assimilate positive or negative vibes on your newly launched product or service which might require you to revisit your product strategy

•    Provide immediate attention to issues, if any, with any particular product

Create a trend of aggregated customer sentiments, for analysis

Source: http://scraping-solutions.blogspot.in/2014_07_01_archive.html

Scraping the Bottom of the Barrel - The Perils of Online Article Marketing

Many online article marketers so desperately wish to succeed, they want to dump corporate life and work for themselves out of their home. They decide they are going to create an online money making website. Therefore, they look around to see what everyone else is doing, and watch the methods others use to attract online buyers, and then they mimic their marketing, their strategies, and their business models.

Still, if you are copying what other people (less ethical people) are doing in online article marketing, those which are scraping the bottom of the barrel and using false advertising and misrepresentations, then all you are really doing is perpetuating distrust on the Internet. Therefore, you are hurting everyone, including people like me. You must realize that people like me don't appreciate that.

Let me give you a few examples of some of the things going on out there, thing that are being done by people who are ethically challenged. Far too many people write articles and then on their byline they send the Internet surfer or reader of the article to a website that has a squeeze page. The squeeze page has no real information on it, rather it asks for their name and e-mail address.

If the would-be Internet surfer is unwise enough to type in their name and email address they will be spammed by e-mail, receiving various hard-sell marketing pieces. Then, if the Internet Surfer does decide to put in their e-mail address, the website grants them access and then takes them to the page with information about what they are selling, or their online marketing "make you a millionaire" scheme.

Generally, these are five page sales letters, with tons of testimonials of people you've never heard of, and may not actually exist, and all sorts of unsubstantiated earnings claims of how much money you will make if you give them $39.35 by way of PayPal, for this limited offer "Now!" And they will send you an E-book with a strategic plan of how you can duplicate what they are doing. The reality is whatever they are doing is questionable to begin with.

If you are going to do online article marketing please don't scrape the bottom of the barrel, there's just too much competition down there from what I can see. Please consider all this.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Scraping-the-Bottom-of-the-Barrel---The-Perils-of-Online-Article-Marketing&id=2710103

Hand Scraped Flooring For a Natural and Unique Look

An option in hardwood flooring that is being increasingly adopted by those looking for something new, innovative and unique for their homes is hand scraped flooring. This type of wood flooring helps one achieve a distinct natural look on one's floor and also has a couple of advantages.

There are three types of scraping that you can get done on your wooden flooring: light, medium and hard. Preferably, if you have a light colored woodwork, then you should go for light scraping and if your floor has a darker shade, then you should opt for hard scraping. But, irrespective of the type of scraping you go for, you must ensure that the laborers doing the scraping are very skilled and impeccable in their job as hand scraping floors is an art that demands patience, time, talent and hard work.

Nowadays, many people tend to go for machine scraping, attracted by the lower investment involved in it. But such people are unable to achieve the requisite natural effect on their floors as machines create patterns on the floors that are easily detectable. These patterns do not emerge with hand scraping and the consequent look is as random and unique as it gets.

Though such scraped flooring is a costly option in flooring, it demands little maintenance. While with perfectly smooth surfaces, you will be always on the edge ensuring that there are no scratches, with hand scraped floors, you will not have to be concerned about this as any new scratches will only add to the already distressed appearance of the flooring.

Prefinished hand scraped wood flooring is also available in the market nowadays. These eliminate the need of any on-site scraping. But this option is of course unsuitable for those who have already got their floors installed. As it is, if you get on-site scraping done, you will have more control over things as you would be able to see the scraping as it develops and would be therefore in a position to exercise your preferences more.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Hand-Scraped-Flooring-For-a-Natural-and-Unique-Look&id=4581623

The Coal Mining Industry And Investing In It

The History Of Coal Usage

Coal was initially used as a domestic fuel, until the industrial revolution, when coal became an integral part of manufacturing for creating electricity, transportation, heating and molding purposes. The large scale mining aspect of coal was introduced around the 18th century, and Britain was the first nation to successfully use advanced coal mining techniques, which involved underground excavation and mining.

Initially coal was scraped off the surface by different processes like drift and shaft mining. This has been done for centuries, and since the demand was quite low, these mining processes were more than enough to accommodate the demand in the market.

However, when the practical uses of using coal as fuel sparked industrial revolution, the demand for coal rose abruptly, leading to severe shortage of the coal output, gradually paving the way for new ways to extract coal from under the ground.

Coal became a popular fuel for all purposes, even to this day, due to their abundance and their ability to produce more energy per mass than other conventional solid fuels like wood. This was important as far as transportation, creating electricity and manufacturing processes are concerned, which allowed industries to use up less space and increase productivity. The usage of coal started to dwindle once alternate energies such as oil and gas began to be used in almost all processes, however, coal is still a primary fuel source for manufacturing processes to this day.

The Process Of Coal Mining

Extracting coal is a difficult and complex process. Coal is a natural resource, a fossil fuel that is a result of millions of years of decay of plants and living organisms under the ground. Some can be found on the surface, while other coal deposits are found deep underground.

Coal mining or extraction comes broadly in two different processes, surface mining, and deep excavation. The method of excavation depends on a number of different factors, such as the depth of the coal deposit below the ground, geological factors such as soil composition, topography, climate, available local resources, etc.

Surface mining is used to scrape off coal that is available on the surface, or just a few feet underground. This can even include mountains of coal deposit, which is extracted by using explosives and blowing up the mountains, later collecting the fragmented coal and process them.

Deep underground mining makes use of underground tunnels, which is built, or dug through, to reach the center of the coal deposit, from where the coal is dug out and brought to the surface by coal workers. This is perhaps the most dangerous excavation procedure, where the lives of all the miners are constantly at a risk.

Investing In Coal

Investing in coal is a safe bet. There are still large reserves of coal deposits around the world, and due to the popularity, coal will be continued to be used as fuel for manufacturing process. Every piece of investment you make in any sort of industry or a manufacturing process ultimately depends on the amount of output the industry can deliver, which is dependent on the usage of any form of fuel, and in most cases, coal.

One might argue that coal usage leads to pollution and lower standards of hygiene for coal workers. This was arguably true in former years; however, newer coal mining companies are taking steps to assure that the environmental aspects of coal mining and usage are kept minimized, all the while providing better working environment and benefits package for their workers. If you can find a mining company that promises all these, and the one that also works within the law, you can be assured safety for your investments in coal.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?The-Coal-Mining-Industry-And-Investing-In-It&id=5871879

Diamond Mines And Mining Techniques

Diamonds remain to this day a mystical gem with a somewhat checkered past. The story of the Hope diamond is based on a long legend of misfortunes supposedly befalling its various and colorful owners. Segregation and mistreatment of blacks in diamond mines in Africa has long been a terrible mark on humanity in that part of the world. Although early white miners were treated better the working conditions endured by all diamond miners were less than humane. Fortunately most of today's mines while still depending on human labor have most of the heavy work done with machinery.

Contrary to popular belief diamonds are mined in areas other than Africa. Some of the better known diamond mines are these.

* Argye one of the Rio Tinto company mines is located in Western Australia.

* Diavik another Rio Tinto mine is located in Canada.

* Ekati owned by BHP Billiton and located in the Northwest Territories of Canada.

* Baken owned by Trans Hexis is located in South Africa.

* Merlin owned by Striker Resources is located in Australia.

* Orapa owned by a partnership between DeBeers and the government of Botswana is in Botswana.

* Premier owned by the De Beers Company is located in South Africa.

Diamond ore is extracted from these mines using basically four mining techniques which are based on the type of geology in which the diamond bearing material is located.

Marine Mining is the most recent development introduced about 1990. This technique is similar to deep water oil drilling. A large shaft is bored into the seabed to a depth where diamond bearing soil is located and that material is sucked to the surface. Also underwater vehicles called "crawlers" move along the seabed to scoop up diamond bearing gravel and pump it to the surface.

Placer Diamond Mining is a technique that is seen many times in movies of the old West. The diamonds are buried in river banks or mountain sides and water canons are used to wash the material down to be processed.

Hard Rock Diamond Mining is again familiar to movie fans as they watched coal miners or gold and silver miners digging their way into deep underground tunnels. Of course the technique is modern now and makes use of many specialized machines to do the heavy work.

Open-Pit diamond mining is similar to the pit coal mines of West Virginia and some western states. Overburden which is the soil covering the diamond embedded material is moved by machinery and blasting. The diamond bearing material is then moved to processing plants. This technique is common when the diamond bearing material is found close to the surface of if the geology is so unstable that tunneling is not safe or practical.

From this short article it should be apparent that diamonds take long and interesting journeys before they find a cherished spot on your finger or ear lobes.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Diamond-Mines-And-Mining-Techniques&id=4800018

Data Mining vs Screen-Scraping

Data mining isn't screen-scraping. I know that some people in the room may disagree with that statement, but they're actually two almost completely different concepts.

In a nutshell, you might state it this way: screen-scraping allows you to get information, where data mining allows you to analyze information. That's a pretty big simplification, so I'll elaborate a bit.

The term "screen-scraping" comes from the old mainframe terminal days where people worked on computers with green and black screens containing only text. Screen-scraping was used to extract characters from the screens so that they could be analyzed. Fast-forwarding to the web world of today, screen-scraping now most commonly refers to extracting information from web sites. That is, computer programs can "crawl" or "spider" through web sites, pulling out data. People often do this to build things like comparison shopping engines, archive web pages, or simply download text to a spreadsheet so that it can be filtered and analyzed.

Data mining, on the other hand, is defined by Wikipedia as the "practice of automatically searching large stores of data for patterns." In other words, you already have the data, and you're now analyzing it to learn useful things about it. Data mining often involves lots of complex algorithms based on statistical methods. It has nothing to do with how you got the data in the first place. In data mining you only care about analyzing what's already there.

The difficulty is that people who don't know the term "screen-scraping" will try Googling for anything that resembles it. We include a number of these terms on our web site to help such folks; for example, we created pages entitled Text Data Mining, Automated Data Collection, Web Site Data Extraction, and even Web Site Ripper (I suppose "scraping" is sort of like "ripping"). So it presents a bit of a problem-we don't necessarily want to perpetuate a misconception (i.e., screen-scraping = data mining), but we also have to use terminology that people will actually use.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Mining-vs-Screen-Scraping&id=146813

4 Types of Mining and Quarry Equipment

You've surveyed the land, spent hours of painstaking research planning the process, and now you are ready to take your mining to the next level. The next phase of the journey will involve the proper equipment. There are several different types of equipment that go into mining. This article will cover some different types of mining equipment to get you started; and if you've already started, it will provide you with valuable knowledge to upgrade your equipment in the future.

Vibrating Feeder

A vibrating feeder is a type of linear direction feeding equipment. Vibrating feeders are widely used in mining and quarry operations and offer several features. Its features include smooth vibrating, dependable operation, and lengthy service life; most importantly, vibrating feeders are suitable for feeding. It consists of a vibrating frame, vibrator, spring, motor vibrating device and motor. The motor causes the vibrating feeder's shafts to rotate, which produces massive power and forces the feeder to vibrate. As the feeder vibrates, materials pass through its funnel and are screened. Common feeder applications include chemicals, minerals, coal, aggregates, and industrial materials.

Permanent and Self Cleaning Magnets

Both permanent and self cleaning magnets can be used on conveyor belts. A permanent magnet is built from a material that is magnetized and creates its own constant magnetic field. Permanent magnetic separators are used on conveyor belts when only limited levels of ferrous metals are expected to pass through. Self cleaning magnets are based on the technology of permanent and electro magnets. The purpose of self cleaning magnetic separators is to automatically remove and separate metallic and non metallic materials.

Forklifts

A forklift is an essential piece of equipment to any mining operation. Industrial forklifts can efficiently move mining supplies and material. Rough terrain forklifts can handle rugged conditions and still manage to perform well. With the standard attachments, a forklift can scoop, grip, pull, lift, scrape, clean, and load almost anything on a mine. Forklifts are extremely versatile and will increase the efficiency of your mining process.

Earthmoving and Construction Equipment
Earthmoving and construction equipment are essential to any mining or quarry operation. This equipment is often used in construction, turf, and excavation work. Examples of earthmoving and construction equipment include: backhoes, bulldozers, and dumpers. A backhoe loader is used for a wide range of jobs including excavating or breaking asphalt. A backhoe loader is a tractor with an arm linking a bucket to the front and a second arm attaching a backhoe in the rear. One benefit of a backhoe loader is that it is fairly small and versatile. A bulldozer is used to push heavy loads like sand from a demolished structure. It is usually much larger than a backhoe loader. A dumper is also designed to carry heavy loads, but these loads are usually in smaller quantities than those of a bulldozer. Backhoes, bulldozers, and dumpers are three types of earthmoving equipment that are critical to the success and efficiency of a mining or construction project.

These are some quarry, mining & construction Equipment in Perth and other places, which are quite essential and useful in these processes. Click on this link to get more information on other necessary equipment.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?4-Types-of-Mining-and-Quarry-Equipment&id=7383379

Unleash the Hidden Potential of Your Business Data With Data Mining and Extraction Services

Every business, small or large, is continuously amassing data about customers, employees and nearly every process in their business cycle. Although all management staff utilize data collected from their business as a basis for decision making in areas such as marketing, forecasting, planning and trouble-shooting, very often they are just barely scratching the surface. Manual data analysis is time-consuming and error-prone, and its limited functions result in the overlooking of valuable information that improve bottom-lines. Often, the sheer quantity of data prevents accurate and useful analysis by those without the necessary technology and experience. It is an unfortunate reality that much of this data goes to waste and companies often never realize that a valuable resource is being left untapped.

Automated data mining services allow your company to tap into the latent potential of large volumes of raw data and convert it into information that can be used in decision-making. While the use of the latest software makes data mining and data extraction fast and affordable, experienced professional data analysts are a key part of the data mining services offered by our company. Making the most of your data involves more than automatically generated reports from statistical software. It takes analysis and interpretation skills that can only be performed by experienced data analysis experts to ensure that your business databases are translated into information that you can easily comprehend and use in almost every aspect of your business.

Who Can Benefit From Data Mining Services?

If you are wondering what types of companies can benefit from data extraction services, the answer is virtually every type of business. This includes organizations dealing in customer service, sales and marketing, financial products, research and insurance.

How is Raw Data Converted to Useful Information?

There are several steps in data mining and extraction, but the most important thing for you as a business owner is to be assured that, throughout the process, the confidentiality of your data is our primary concern. Upon receiving your data, it is converted into the necessary format so that it can be entered into a data warehouse system. Next, it is compiled into a database, which is then sifted through by data mining experts to identify relevant data. Our trained and experienced staff then scan and analyze your data using a variety of methods to identify association or relationships between variables; clusters and classes, to identify correlations and groups within your data; and patterns, which allow trends to be identified and predictions to be made. Finally, the results are compiled in the form of written reports, visual data and spreadsheets, according to the needs of your business.

Our team of data mining, extraction and analyses experts have already helped a great number of businesses to tap into the potential of their raw data, with our speedy, cost-efficient and confidential services. Contact us today for more information on how our data mining and extraction services can help your business.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Unleash-the-Hidden-Potential-of-Your-Business-Data-With-Data-Mining-and-Extraction-Services&id=4642076

Database Mining

The term database mining refers to the process of extracting information from a set database and transforming that into understandable information. The data mining process is also known as data dredging or data snooping. The consumer focused companies into retail, financial, communication, and marketing fields are using data mining for cost reduction and increase revenues. This process is the powerful technology, which helps the organisations to focus on the most important and relevant information from their collected data. Organisations can easily understand the potential customers and their behaviour with this process. By predicting behaviours of future trends the recruitment process outsourcing firms assists the multiple organisations to make proactive and profitable decisions in their business. The database mining term is originated from the similarities between searching for valuable information in large databases and mining a mountain for a vein of valuable crystal.

Recruitment process outsourcing firm helps the organisation for the betterment of their future by analyzing the data from distinctive dimensions or angles. From the business point of view, the data mining and data entry services leads the organisation to increase their profitability and customer demands. Data mining process is must for every organisation to survive in the competitive market and quality assurance. Now a day the data mining services are actively utilised and adapted by many organisations to achieve great success and analyse competitor growth, profit analysis, budget, and sales etc. The data mining is a form of artificial intelligence that uses the automated process to find required information. You can easily and swiftly plan your business strategy for the future by finding and collecting the equivalent information from huge data.

With the advanced analytics and modern techniques, the database mining process uncovers the in-depth business intelligence. You can ask for the certain information and let this process provide you information, which can lead to an immense improvement in your business and quality. Every organisation holds a huge amount of data in their database. Due to rapid computerisation of business, the large amount of data gets produced by every organisation and then database mining comes in the picture. When there are problems arising and challenges addressing in the database management of your organisation, the fundamental usage of data mining will help you out with maximum returns. Thus, from the strategic point of view, the rapidly growing world of digital data will depend on the ability of mining and managing the data.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Database-Mining&id=7292341

Data Mining and Financial Data Analysis

Introduction:

Most marketers understand the value of collecting financial data, but also realize the challenges of leveraging this knowledge to create intelligent, proactive pathways back to the customer. Data mining - technologies and techniques for recognizing and tracking patterns within data - helps businesses sift through layers of seemingly unrelated data for meaningful relationships, where they can anticipate, rather than simply react to, customer needs as well as financial need. In this accessible introduction, we provides a business and technological overview of data mining and outlines how, along with sound business processes and complementary technologies, data mining can reinforce and redefine for financial analysis.

Objective:

1. The main objective of mining techniques is to discuss how customized data mining tools should be developed for financial data analysis.

2. Usage pattern, in terms of the purpose can be categories as per the need for financial analysis.

3. Develop a tool for financial analysis through data mining techniques.

Data mining:

Data mining is the procedure for extracting or mining knowledge for the large quantity of data or we can say data mining is "knowledge mining for data" or also we can say Knowledge Discovery in Database (KDD). Means data mining is : data collection , database creation, data management, data analysis and understanding.

There are some steps in the process of knowledge discovery in database, such as

1. Data cleaning. (To remove nose and inconsistent data)

2. Data integration. (Where multiple data source may be combined.)

3. Data selection. (Where data relevant to the analysis task are retrieved from the database.)

4. Data transformation. (Where data are transformed or consolidated into forms appropriate for mining by performing summary or aggregation operations, for instance)

5. Data mining. (An essential process where intelligent methods are applied in order to extract data patterns.)

6. Pattern evaluation. (To identify the truly interesting patterns representing knowledge based on some interesting measures.)

7. Knowledge presentation.(Where visualization and knowledge representation techniques are used to present the mined knowledge to the user.)

Data Warehouse:

A data warehouse is a repository of information collected from multiple sources, stored under a unified schema and which usually resides at a single site.

Text:

Most of the banks and financial institutions offer a wide verity of banking services such as checking, savings, business and individual customer transactions, credit and investment services like mutual funds etc. Some also offer insurance services and stock investment services.

There are different types of analysis available, but in this case we want to give one analysis known as "Evolution Analysis".

Data evolution analysis is used for the object whose behavior changes over time. Although this may include characterization, discrimination, association, classification, or clustering of time related data, means we can say this evolution analysis is done through the time series data analysis, sequence or periodicity pattern matching and similarity based data analysis.

Data collect from banking and financial sectors are often relatively complete, reliable and high quality, which gives the facility for analysis and data mining. Here we discuss few cases such as,

Eg, 1. Suppose we have stock market data of the last few years available. And we would like to invest in shares of best companies. A data mining study of stock exchange data may identify stock evolution regularities for overall stocks and for the stocks of particular companies. Such regularities may help predict future trends in stock market prices, contributing our decision making regarding stock investments.

Eg, 2. One may like to view the debt and revenue change by month, by region and by other factors along with minimum, maximum, total, average, and other statistical information. Data ware houses, give the facility for comparative analysis and outlier analysis all are play important roles in financial data analysis and mining.

Eg, 3. Loan payment prediction and customer credit analysis are critical to the business of the bank. There are many factors can strongly influence loan payment performance and customer credit rating. Data mining may help identify important factors and eliminate irrelevant one.

Factors related to the risk of loan payments like term of the loan, debt ratio, payment to income ratio, credit history and many more. The banks than decide whose profile shows relatively low risks according to the critical factor analysis.

We can perform the task faster and create a more sophisticated presentation with financial analysis software. These products condense complex data analyses into easy-to-understand graphic presentations. And there's a bonus: Such software can vault our practice to a more advanced business consulting level and help we attract new clients.

To help us find a program that best fits our needs-and our budget-we examined some of the leading packages that represent, by vendors' estimates, more than 90% of the market. Although all the packages are marketed as financial analysis software, they don't all perform every function needed for full-spectrum analyses. It should allow us to provide a unique service to clients.

The Products:

ACCPAC CFO (Comprehensive Financial Optimizer) is designed for small and medium-size enterprises and can help make business-planning decisions by modeling the impact of various options. This is accomplished by demonstrating the what-if outcomes of small changes. A roll forward feature prepares budgets or forecast reports in minutes. The program also generates a financial scorecard of key financial information and indicators.

Customized Financial Analysis by BizBench provides financial benchmarking to determine how a company compares to others in its industry by using the Risk Management Association (RMA) database. It also highlights key ratios that need improvement and year-to-year trend analysis. A unique function, Back Calculation, calculates the profit targets or the appropriate asset base to support existing sales and profitability. Its DuPont Model Analysis demonstrates how each ratio affects return on equity.

Financial Analysis CS reviews and compares a client's financial position with business peers or industry standards. It also can compare multiple locations of a single business to determine which are most profitable. Users who subscribe to the RMA option can integrate with Financial Analysis CS, which then lets them provide aggregated financial indicators of peers or industry standards, showing clients how their businesses compare.

iLumen regularly collects a client's financial information to provide ongoing analysis. It also provides benchmarking information, comparing the client's financial performance with industry peers. The system is Web-based and can monitor a client's performance on a monthly, quarterly and annual basis. The network can upload a trial balance file directly from any accounting software program and provide charts, graphs and ratios that demonstrate a company's performance for the period. Analysis tools are viewed through customized dashboards.

PlanGuru by New Horizon Technologies can generate client-ready integrated balance sheets, income statements and cash-flow statements. The program includes tools for analyzing data, making projections, forecasting and budgeting. It also supports multiple resulting scenarios. The system can calculate up to 21 financial ratios as well as the breakeven point. PlanGuru uses a spreadsheet-style interface and wizards that guide users through data entry. It can import from Excel, QuickBooks, Peachtree and plain text files. It comes in professional and consultant editions. An add-on, called the Business Analyzer, calculates benchmarks.

ProfitCents by Sageworks is Web-based, so it requires no software or updates. It integrates with QuickBooks, CCH, Caseware, Creative Solutions and Best Software applications. It also provides a wide variety of businesses analyses for nonprofits and sole proprietorships. The company offers free consulting, training and customer support. It's also available in Spanish.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Mining-and-Financial-Data-Analysis&id=2752017

Online Retail - Mining for Gold

Online retailers live in an ever-changing environment, and the ability to stay competitive is the difference between doing well and doing nothing. In today's fast paced internet market place, if you aren't using web scraping, you are missing a key component to growing your business.

Data Mining

Data mining your competition's prices and services and making sure your prices and services are similar, or even lower, is what makes the difference. Why should your customer choose you if they can get the same product somewhere else for less? What data you collect and how often you update it is also another key ingredient to success.

Extract Website Data

Web scraping allows you to gather information from your competition and use it improve your position in the market. When you extract website data from your competitor's website, it allows you to conduct business from a position that doesn't involve guess work. The internet is an environment that is constantly being updated and changed. It is vital that you have the ability to have up-to-date information on what others in your market are doing. If you can't do this, you really can't compete.

Application of Information

When you know what your competitors are doing all the time, you can keep your business a little more competitive than they are. When you have information such as monthly and even weekly price variations in the market and what products and services are being offered, you can apply that information to your own pricing matrix and ensure a competitive edge in your market.

An Army of One

Web scraping gives you the ability to see what is going on in the market at all times. You can monitor just about anything you choose with a web scraping service. Many online retailers are very small operations and they don't have the resources to constantly monitor each competitor's website - so engaging a web scraping service is like having your own marketing and research team working for you night and day to keep tabs on them. You choose what it is you want to know, and your research team goes to work. Simple.

Staying Ahead of Trends

Having the ability to recognize trends is the key to any business, especially on the internet were information is so fluid. The business that can identify a trend quickly and take advantage of it will always stay one step ahead. That's why big corporations have teams dedicated to researching market trends and predictions. If you can see where something is going, you can always get ahead of it. That's what web scraping can help you do - identify those trends in your market so you can get in ahead of the pack.

A Helping Hand

Sometimes running your own online retail business can be a daunting and lonely ordeal. Even those that have a great deal of experience with the internet can feel lost at times. A web scraping service is a tool you can use to help yourself in such times. Web scraping is automated and precise, and it gives you the ability to have vital information delivered to you in a manner you can understand and use. It's one less thing to worry about - and the information you get from data mining is what every business owner actually should worry about - what the competition is doing? With a web scraping service, you can concern yourself with other things - like making more profits.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Online-Retail---Mining-for-Gold&id=6531024

Application of Web Data Mining in CRM

The process of improvising the customer relations and interactions and making them more amicable may be termed as Customer relationship management (CRM). Since web data mining is used in the utilization of the various modeling and data analysis methods in detecting given patterns and relationships in the data, it can be used as an effective tool in CRM. By the effectively using web data mining you are able to understand what your customers what.

It is important to note that web data mining can be used effectively in searching for the right and potential customers to be offered the right products at the right time. The result of this in any business is the increase in the revenue generated. This is made possible as you are able to respond to each customer in an effective and efficient way. The method further utilizes very few resources and can be therefore termed as an economical method.

In the next paragraphs we discuss the basic process of customer relationship management and its integration with web data mining service. The following are the basic process that should be used in understanding what your customers need, sending them the right offers and products, and reducing the resources used in managing your customers.

Defining the business objective. Web data mining can be used to define and inform your customers your business objective. By doing research you can be able to determine whether your business objective is communicated well to your customers and clients. Does your business objective take interest in the customers? Your business goal must be clearly outlined in your business CRM. By having a more precise and defined goal is the possible way of ensuring success in the customer relationship management.

Source: http://www.loginworks.com/blogs/web-scraping-blogs/application-web-data-mining-crm/

What is Blog Content Scraping?

Blog content scraping is an act usually performed with scripts that extract content from numerous sources and pulls it into one site. It is so easy now that anyone can install a WordPress site, put a free or commercial theme, and install a few plugins that will go and scrape content from selected blogs, so it can be published on their site.

Why are they Stealing my Content?

Some of our users have asked us why are they stealing my content? The simple answer is because you are AWESOME. The truth is that these content scrapers have ulterior motives. Below are just few reasons why someone would scrape your content:

•    Affiliate commission – There are some dirty affiliate marketers out there that just wants to exploit the system to make few extra bucks. They will use your content and other’s content to bring traffic to their site through search engine. These sites are usually targeted towards a specific niche, so they have related products that they are promoting.

•    Lead Generation – Often we see lawyers and realtors doing this. They want to seem like industry leaders in their small communities. They do not have the bandwidth to produce quality content, so they go out and scrape content from other sources. Sometimes, they are not even aware of this because they are paying some scumbag $30/month to add content and help them get better SEO. We have encountered quite a few of these in the past.

•    Advertising Revenue – Some folks just want to create a “hub” of knowledge. A one-stop-shop for users in a specific niche. If I had a penny for every time someone has done this with our content, then we would have a few hundred pennies. Often we notice that our site content is being scraped. The scraper always replies, I was doing this for the good of the community. Except the site is plastered with ads.

These are just a few reasons why someone would steal your content.

Source:http://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/beginners-guide-to-preventing-blog-content-scraping-in-wordpress/

The A B C D of Data Mining Services

If you are very new to the term 'data mining', let the meaning be explained to you. It is form of back office support services that are being offered by many call centers to analyze data from numerous resources and amalgamate them for some useful task. The business establishments in the present generation need to develop a strategy that helps them to cooperate with the market trends and allow them to perform well. The process of data mining is actually the retrieval process of essential and informative data that helps an organization to analyze the business perspectives and can further generate better interests in cutting cost, developing revenue and to acquire valuable data on business services/products.

It is a powerful analytical tool that permits the user to customize a wide range of data in different formats and categories as per their necessity. The data mining process is an integral part of a business plan for companies that need to undertake a diverse research on the customer building process. These analytical skills are generally performed by skilled industrial experts who assist the firms to accelerate their growth through the critical business activities. With a vast applicability in the present time, the back office support services with the data mining process is helping the businesses in understanding and predicting valuable information. Some of them include:

•    Profiles of customers
•    Customer buying behavior
•    Customer buying trends
•    Industry analysis

For a layman it is somewhat the process of processing some statistical data or methods. These processes are implemented with some specific tools that preform the following:

•    Automated model scoring
•    Business templates
•    Computing target columns
•    Database integration
•    Exporting models to other applications
•    Incorporating financial information

There are some benefits of Data Mining. Few of them are as follows:

•    To understand the requirements of the customers which can help in efficient planning.
•    Helps in minimizing risk and improve ROI.
•    Generate more business and target the relevant market.
•    Risk free outsourcing experience
•    Provide data access to business analysts
•    A better understanding of the demand supply graph
•    Improve profitability by detect unusual pattern in sales, claims, transactions
•    To cut down the expenses of Direct Marketing

Data mining is generally a part of the offshore back office services and outsourced to business establishments that require diverse data base on customers and their particular approach towards any service or product. For example banks, telecommunication companies, insurance companies, etc. require huge data base to promote their new policies. If you represent a similar company that needs appropriate data mining process then it is better that you outsource back office support services from a third party and fulfill your business goals with excellent results.

Katie Cardwell works as a senior sales and marketing analyst for a multinational call center company, based in United States of America. She takes care of all the business operations and analysis the back office support services that power an organization. Her extensive knowledge and expertise on Non -voice call center services such as Data Mining Services, Back office support services, etc, have helped many business players to stand with a straight spine and thus making a foothold in the data processing industry.

Source:http://ezinearticles.com/?The-A-B-C-D-of-Data-Mining-Services&id=6503339