Web Scraping With Chrome Scraper Extension – Semalt Expert

Sraper is an automated script and an easy-to-use tool used for extracting data from web pages and exporting the scraped data into spreadsheets. If you are a Google Chrome enthusiast, Chrome Scraper Extension is the best tool to consider. This web scraping tool will help you extract useful information from the preferred web page and export it to Google Docs.

Why to choose Chrome Scraper Extension?

Google chrome scraper plugin is a do-it-yourself tool that extracts large amounts of data from the web into readable formats. To install scraper extension on your browser, visit Chrome Web Store and click "Add to Chrome" option to complete the installation process. With this plugin, you don't have to hire a programmer to scrape web pages for you.

Once installed on your browser, scraper extension undertakes all the scraping process for you. To get started, select the information to be scraped, right-click on the selected data and click "Scrape Similar."

If you are looking forward to using scraper extension, knowledge of a programming language is a minimum requirement. However, if you are familiar with XPath, things will get so much easier for you. For clarity purposes, XPath is a programming language that uses path expressions to select node-sets. In most cases, XPath is used on eXtensible Markup Language (XML) documents where it works to navigate through essential attributes and elements used in an XML document.

How to scrape a web page using Chrome scraper plugin?

In this guide, you'll learn how to scrape web pages and XML documents with a scraper extension. Use the following guide to extract useful data from a web page and export it into Google Docs.

  • Start your Chrome browser and search for Chrome Web Store. Click on "Add to Chrome" option that will pop up on your screen display.
  • Open your target document or web page and select all the data to be scraped.
  • Right-click on the selected text and hit "Scrape Similar" option.
  • Chrome will open another window with the scraped data. To export the extracted data, click on "Save to Google docs" option to save the content to your Google Docs.

Advanced web scraping with scraper extension

XPath is a programming language used to select node-sets in an XML-based text. This programming language uses path expressions that can be used in JavaScript and Python. If you experience challenges when trying to scrape a web page, open your scraper console and you'll find a small box on your top-left corner.

With scraper extension, you can either go for jQuery or XPath. In this case, click on "XPath" to find the target elements in a web page. To execute the scraping task, identify the right element in a page and create its XPath. A scraper console comprises "Columns" section. Use the column sections to get your scraped data in readable and usable formats.