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Show HN: ParseHub – Extract data from dynamic websites
- nivertech 12y agoPricing page no found: 404 Not Found The resource could not be found. /pricing
- tsergiu 12y agoThanks! Pushing a fix now. Edit: Fixed
- nivertech 12y agoAlso 404 https://www.parsehub.com/docs/template https://www.parsehub.com/docs/template
- tsergiu 12y agoA fix is on the way!
- superasn 12y agoThe website looks really interesting and very useful if it works like in the demo. My only issue is $79 / mo starting plan looks a bit steep for casual development (I know there is a free option) but if you want to attract more buyers i think something like GitHub's pricing would be really attractive for prospective buyers like me (something like $22 / month for 10 private projects with 10 pages / min). Just a suggestion in case you're looking for feedback.
- tsergiu 12y agoDidn't find an email in your profile. I'd love to discuss with you further. Can you email me at serge@parsehub.com?
- superasn 12y agothanks! I've sent you an email. Also couldn't figure out how to use select boxes, radio buttons, or fill a specific text field on the page. The "expression" page in the doc is also 404. I guess you must have too much on your plate right now, so all this is just fyi.
- balor123 12y agoAgreed on this point. The automatic IP rotation is one of the bigger features I think.
- notastartup 12y agoUnlimited scraping at https://scrape.it https://scrape.it is $20/month which has no restrictions in how many projects you can create or how many pages you can scrape.
- ar7hur 12y agoLooks powerful. Just curious, how does it compare to Kimono Labs?
- tsergiu 12y agoWe think Kimono is a great tool, but it is very limited in capability. We specifically focus on handling highly dynamic or interactive websites. Our toolset gives you more flexibility over how you can extract data. For example, you can extract all the nested comment data from a reddit post, or you can extract data from maps without having to fumble around in the web inspector.
- blklane 12y agoAfter using both there is a very large brick wall that prevents usability of kimono labs on most well-known web applications (airbnb, craiglist, etc). Example is data extraction from content visible via hover (airbnb calendar pricing) which ParseHub is able to handle. Thanks a lot for building this, I am excited to save server costs/time from scraping data for projects.
- tsergiu 12y agoOne of the founders here. Our goal with ParseHub is to enable data extraction not only from static websites, but from highly dynamic or complicated ones as well. We've done this by separating the concepts of selecting and doing something to a selection. Specifically, we've created tools like click, input, hover, etc. that you can combine with any selection, and with each other. This keeps a lot of the power that you have with programming. This also applies to the data structures that are created. So it's easy to express nested lists or even recursive lists, because of the ability to combine tools easily. If you have any questions I'd love to answer them.
- grimtrigger 12y agoCool stuff! > Easily turn websites into APIs or tables of data you can download in JSON or CSV Do you need to download, or can you call these APIs from an application?
- tsergiu 12y agoWe have a fully-documented API that you can use to integrate directly with your app. https://www.parsehub.com/docs/ref/api https://www.parsehub.com/docs/ref/api
- ihiram 12y agoThe demo is magical. Excellent work! One question about this FAQ: > Does ParseHub respect robots.txt? > We're working on an admin panel to give webmasters full transparency and control. We'll have more info soon. What does that mean? I read it as ParseHub does not respect robots.txt, which as a content owner is a bit disappointing. Would you elaborate on your thinking?
- tsergiu 12y agoSorry, we'll make the wording more clear. At the moment, ParseHub does not respect robots.txt. We do expect to add this + features for webmasters in the future, but have not had the developer cycles to do this yet.
- tectonic 12y agoVery cool! Another useful tool is http://selectorgadget.com http://selectorgadget.com
- ssiddharth 12y agoFWIW, the Facebook SVG in the home page doesn't seem to be loading for me. Rest looks great. Congrats!
- tsergiu 12y agoThanks, we'll look into it.
- adelevie 12y agoThis reminds me of the wonderfully cool Web 2.0-era startup Dapper.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- HashBrowns 12y agoThis looks like a great utility for data analysis. Thanks. Doesn't see to be functioning on the Tor browser bundle by default, but maybe there are instructions of how to do that somewhere. Will continue to test it out, and see how everything works.
- tsergiu 12y agoSorry about that. We haven't tested with Tor. I hope disabling Tor is suitable for your use case.
- jrochkind1 12y agoI think many websites people are going to want to extract from are going to have anti-scraping/anti-robot traffic controls that are going to try to keep out a scraper like this. Amazon.com for instance. Probably google properties. That they will in the future plan on respecting robots.txt suggests they don't mean to get places content owners don't want them. On the other hand, automatic IP rotation kind of suggests they do mean to (what other purpose is there for that?). Either way, it might be a limitation on what you might dream of using it for. My own experiments with scraping Amazon and Google have been stopped in the water by their anti-bot traffic controls. (Amazon recently improved theirs).
- techdragon 12y agoHaving built scrapers working against some of these measures, you would be really surprised at how often they are accidental. Shared hosting providers often set them as defaults, at least as far as I see from the work I've done. The real barrier I find is the current case law in the US, which seems to be the jurisdiction of choice for many web companies. It's currently a real possibility that you will be criminally in breach of the law and suffer the cost if you blatantly and knowingly continue after being notified of their ToS. Yes google and other big companies have nothing to fear, but it's pretty much a case of "how many people are dumb enough to pick a fight with mike Tyson?" If you target your scraping to further your own business, and impinge on someone else's business model, your in water that is currently murky. It really needs to be settled but until another lawsuit rises to the Supreme Court in the US, we won't have that, so it's just a matter of being aware that while your not trying to be an evil criminal, you may still be viewed as such by someone you scrape.
- tsergiu 12y agoWe've invested very heavily in building out a solid infrastructure for extracting data. We want to make sure that the product Just Works for our users, and that includes rotating IP addresses (you don't have to fiddle with your own, we have access to a pool of thousands). Robots.txt is a tricky balancing act. It was first conceived in 1994, and was designed for crawlers that tried to suck up all the pages on the web. ParseHub, on the other hand, is very specifically targeted by a human. A human tells ParseHub exactly which pages and which pieces of data to extract. From that point of view, ParseHub is more like a "bulk web browser" than a robot. Here are some examples that make this line blurry. If I tell ParseHub to log into a site, visit a single page, and extract one piece of information on it, does that violate robots.txt? If yes, then your browser has been violating robots.txt for years. The screenshots of your most visited websites are updated by periodically polling those sites (and ignoring robots.txt). My browser is currently showing a picture of my gmail inbox, which is blocked by robots.txt https://mail.google.com/robots.txt https://mail.google.com/robots.txt More importantly, your computer and browser already do a lot of robot-like stuff to turn your mouse click into a request that's sent to the server. You don't have to write out the full request yourself. Is that then considered a robot? If not, then why is it considered a robot when ParseHub does the same (again, assuming a single request) thing? Furthermore, some sites don't specify rate limits in robots.txt, but still actively block IP addresses when they cross some threshold. It is far from a perfect standard, so it makes a lot of practical sense to have the ability to rotate IPs, even if it's not appropriate to use that ability all the time. Our goal here is to be able to distinguish between the good type and bad type of scraping and give webmasters full transparency. Obviously this is a hard problem. If you have any feedback on any of this we'd love to hear it. ps. we've tested our infrastructure on many Alexa top 100 sites and can say with moderate confidence that it will Just Work. pps. if you're a webmaster, having ParseHub extract data from your site is probably far preferable to the alternative. People usually hack together their own scripts if their tools can't do the job. ParseHub does very aggressive caching of content and tries to figure out the traffic patterns of the host so that we can throttle based on the traffic the host is receiving. Hacked together scripts rarely go through the trouble of doing that.
- plingamp 12y agoScraping is always such a pain, this looks incredibly well done. I've personally have had a really good experience with PhantomJS. What does your backend look like? (What happens when a API request is made)
- tsergiu 12y agoWe run a headless browser to execute your extraction.
- nextbig 12y agoExcellent! How about creating google now replica but for offline use + more private data dashboard. - Use your platform to parse dynamic website which are completely under controll to user, so no privacy issue - Dont store data intocloud so no security issue - create common parsing parse job and distribute it through central server / store - such as parsing bank account from bank of america / chase / well fargo etc - parsing my stock portfolio etc Your platform can act as job creator and people can crowd source the job script! Can create amazing private dashboard where user can see its private data at once , no cloud interfearance so no worry about security and privacy.
- tsergiu 12y agoGreat ideas to consider for the future!. We may decide to release an offline version of ParseHub eventually.
- Kiro 12y agoIs this legal? Can I use this to scrape and store Google Search results?
- sqrt17 12y agoaccording to Google TOS, you cannot, and Google will ban you as soon as the traffic from your host(s) will look more like monkeys on typewriters than actual people looking for search results. Will it have legal consequences? Most likely no. Will your coworkers or employees stab you with a rusty fork for getting their (most likely) favorite search engine to block them? Absolutely.
- fnbr 12y agoHow does ParseHub compare to Kimono [1]? I use Kimono daily (scraping government expense docs), and I love how it works on static sites. If you've managed to replicate that on dynamic ones, I'll be a very happy customer. [1]: https://www.kimonolabs.com/ https://www.kimonolabs.com/
- tsergiu 12y agoSorry for the delayed response. See my answer to a similar question in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8356999 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8356999 If you have any more questions or just want to chat, feel free to shoot me an email directly at serge@parsehub.com
- fenesiistvan 12y agoFor these kind of tasks I always used an app written by myself using an embedded browser control (webkit engine or IE ActiveX control on Windows). So I load the page and just call the control methods (usually just to convert the output to plain text). How are this tool (and similar tools) more efficient then the highly optimized browser engines? I am missing something here?
- tsergiu 12y agoParseHub itself runs on a highly optimized browser engine. The idea is to give a visual interface so that you don't have to worry about low-level details of how to control the browser. This also makes it easier to reason about the logic of what's happening since humans have stronger spatial reasoning than symbolic reasoning.
- nhjk 12y agoAre you using phantomjs/selenium and friends or did you write your own?
- kyriakos 12y agoreally nice. unfortunately gets a bit slow on long pages but it does work well and I like the fact that you offer an unlimited free plan.