Search Engine Scraping – Semalt Explains The Role Of GoogleScraper, iMacros And cURL In Search Engine Scraping

Search engine scraping is the practice of harvesting descriptions, URLs and other information from Google, Yahoo and Big. It is a specific form of web scraping or screen scraping that is dedicated to the search engines only. SEO experts mainly scrape keywords from the search engines, especially Google, for monitoring the competitive position of their customers' sites. They index or crawl different web pages using those keywords (both short-tail and long-tail ones). The process of extracting a site content in an automated fashion is also known as crawling. Bing, Yahoo and Google get all their data from the automated crawlers, spiders and bots.

Role of GoogleScraper in search engine scraping:

GoogleScraper is capable of parsing the Google results and allows us to extract links, their titles, and descriptions. It enables us to process scraped data for further uses and transforms it from unstructured form to an organized and structured form.

Google is by far the largest search engine with millions of web pages and countless URLs. It may not be possible for us to scrape data using an ordinary web scraper or data extractor. But with GoogleScraper, we can easily extract URLs, descriptions, images, tags, and keywords and can improve the search engine ranking of our site. If you are using GoogleScraper, the chances are that Google will not penalize your site for duplicate content as the scraped data is unique, readable, scalable and informative.

Role of iMacros and cURL in search engine scraping:

When developing a search engine scraper, some existing tools and libraries can either be used, analyzed or extended to learn from.

• iMacros:

This free automation toolkit allows you to scrape data from numerous web pages at a time. Unlike GoogleScraper, iMacros is compatible with all web browsers and operating systems.

• cURL:

It is a command-line browser and the open-source HTTP interaction library that helps test the quality of scraped data. cURL can be used with different programming languages such as Python, PHP, C++, JavaScript, and Ruby.

Is GoogleScraper better than iMacros and cURL:

When scraping websites, iMacros and cURL don't function properly. They have a limited number of options and features. Most often, the data scraped with both of these frameworks is unreadable and has lots of spelling or grammatical mistakes. In contrast, the content scraped with GoogleScraper is up to the mark, readable, scalable and engaging. Plus, GoogleScraper is used to extract data from dynamic sites, and you can undertake multiple web scraping tasks simultaneously, saving your time and energy.

GoogleScraper is also used to scrape content from news websites such as CNN, Inquisitr, and BBCC. It quickly navigates through different web documents, identifies how the search engines see the internet, collects useful data, and scrapes it with just a few clicks. Meanwhile, we cannot neglect the fact that GoogleScraper will not support the massive gathering of data. It means if you want to collect volumes of data from the net, you should not opt for GoogleScraper and should look for another web scraper or data extractor.