How to Scrape Data from the Internet Without Programming Skills

Looking for data to support your business strategy? You simply cannot collect data by performing a Google search and manually copying it into a spreadsheet. That makes no sense, as the need for data is enormous if you want to do something useful with it.

While search engines can help you find what you're looking for in seconds, the data you find is unstructured and therefore cannot be used for large-scale analysis.

Perhaps you've been lucky enough to get a spreadsheet from an agency that has ready-made public archives, but more likely you'll encounter tables or lists that are not easily manipulable.

Presenting data in HTML tables is common practice; for example, many government agencies distribute reports that way. That's why you need to scrape websites. Web scraping has been part of computer science for many years. It is a technologically complex process and therefore requires technical knowledge.

Creating programs that can extract data from raw code also takes a lot of time and therefore requires specialization. The only thing that might stop you from building a web scraping tool is the lack of programming skills.

But there is hope; we'll show you how to perform web scraping without programming skills. How about a handy tool that doesn't require any coding skills?

Here, OutWit Hub comes to our rescue. It is a Firefox add-on that you can download and install in your browser to enable data collection.

With it, you can start extracting data from web pages with just a few clicks. OutWit Hub comes with many data recognition and extraction features that can deliver the results you need. You can also customize it to meet your specific needs.

How to Use OutWit Hub for Data Extraction

First, download the OutWit Hub add-on from the Mozilla add-ons store and install it in your Firefox browser. You'll need to restart the browser for the add-on to take effect. After launching, you'll see several simple scraping options in the left panel.

These options are basic and can be used for tasks like extracting all images from a web page or links on a page. If you need advanced scraping options, go to Automators>Scrapers. The web page's source code will be displayed. Look in the source code for tagged attributes that can be used as markers for specific elements you might want to extract.

If you browse through this code, you can find common patterns of the information you need to extract from the page. Many text snippets or symbols will be obvious.

After figuring out which pattern is used on the page, you can fill in the 'Marker before' and 'Marker after' fields with the appropriate tags that enclose the data you need. Now you can click the 'Execute' button and sit back while OutWit Hub scrapes the data from the desired pages.

Confused? Here's an example. If you want to extract all bold text from a web page, you simply use 'before' and 'after' as markers.

If you need data from an HTML table, OutWit Hub allows you to use multiple scrapers simultaneously, allowing you to extract many columns of data in minimal time.

You should also check OutWit Hub's documentation section to find guides that can make the data extraction process easier.

If you need to extract more complex data, this can also be done with OutWit Hub. For example, you might want to extract data from a series of similarly structured pages. To do this, use the Format column in the scraper section to insert a 'Regular Expression'.

This way you can define patterns. The process is fairly simple, and you'll quickly get the hang of it by experimenting with the options.

OutWit Hub is indeed a great tool for data extraction without programming skills, but it's not the only option. For example, if you want to extract data from Wikipedia into a Google spreadsheet, you can do that using the IMPORTHTML function in Google Docs.

While it's a great tool for easily extracting information from web pages, it has its limitations. Truth be told, using a programming language is the best option for extracting data from the Internet, given the flexibility it provides.

But if you don't like programming, that's not a dead end either. There are several excellent web scraping services that can meet your scraping needs with professional accuracy. Using a service also saves you the hassle of sifting through, cleaning, and classifying unstructured data from the Internet.

This means that as a business owner, you can spend more of your precious time analyzing data rather than collecting and then analyzing it.

When you outgrow OutWit Hub's scraping limitations and want to streamline the entire process, it's time to switch to a scraping provider that meets your requirements. And if you're looking for a suitable scraping service, check out the things to keep in mind when choosing a scraping service.