3 Best Article Scraping Software Tools for 2023
Are you feeling overwhelmed trying to keep up with all the news and blog content published every day? With millions of articles posted online, it‘s impossible to read everything that might be relevant to your interests or work. That‘s where article scraping comes in handy.
Article scraping is the process of automatically extracting articles from websites using software tools called web scrapers or crawlers. You simply specify the websites or topics you‘re interested in, and the scraper will visit those pages, find the relevant articles, and extract the content and metadata like title, author, date, images, etc. into a structured format.
Article scraping allows you to:
- Collect and read articles from many sources in one place
- Discover new relevant content beyond what you already follow
- Analyze trends and generate insights from large volumes of articles
- Create curated newsletters, RSS feeds, or datasets for further use
Some websites make article scraping easy by providing RSS feeds with the full article text. But many sites don‘t have RSS at all, or their RSS feeds only contain a summary, requiring you to visit the site to read the full content.
Dynamic websites with elements like infinite scroll, lazy loading, and authentication pose additional challenges for article scraping. Luckily, modern web scraping tools can handle these issues with ease.
When evaluating article scraping software, look for tools that meet your needs in terms of:
- Ease of use – intuitive interface for non-technical users
- Feature set – ability to handle dynamic content, search, pagination, etc.
- Cross-platform support – works on your operating system(s) of choice
- Speed and reliability – fast scraping that doesn‘t get blocked
- Scheduling and automation – ability to scrape on a set schedule or trigger
- Data delivery – saves data in your preferred format and location
- Customer support and documentation – responsive, helpful support and clear documentation
I‘ve tested over a dozen web scraping tools for article scraping. Here are my top 3 picks for 2023:
- Octoparse
Octoparse is a powerful yet user-friendly web scraping tool that requires no coding. Its point-and-click interface lets you build scrapers by interacting with web pages in a built-in browser.
Octoparse offers pre-built scraping templates for popular article sources like Medium, Wikipedia, and Reddit. You can also build a custom scraper in minutes using its intuitive workflow designer.
Octoparse shines in handling scraping roadblocks common to article sites. It can easily click through slideshows and tab sets, scroll infinitely loading pages, handle search and pagination, parse comment threads, and even log in to sites that require authentication.
Octoparse‘s scheduling and cloud features let you automate your scraping on a set schedule and scale it up with the click of a button. It supports saving data to various formats like CSV, JSON, and databases, and can notify you or trigger actions via webhooks and API integrations.
If you get stuck, Octoparse‘s responsive support team and extensive documentation site are there to help. They also offer fully managed web scraping services if you need a done-for-you solution.
- ParseHub
ParseHub is another powerful visual web scraping tool that‘s well-suited for article scraping. Like Octoparse, it provides an intuitive point-and-click interface for building scrapers without coding.
What sets ParseHub apart is its focus on ease of use for non-technical users. Its project templates and tutorials make it easy for anyone to start scraping articles within minutes.
ParseHub has robust features for handling dynamic page elements and multi-page articles. For example, you can use its relative select and scroll down commands to handle articles split across multiple pages or loaded via infinite scroll.
ParseHub offers a generous free plan that lets you scrape up to 200 pages per run. Paid plans unlock more pages per run, higher concurrency, scheduling, and API access. ParseHub‘s APIs let you integrate your scrapers with other tools to automate your workflow.
- Diffbot
Diffbot is a unique article scraping solution that uses AI and computer vision to intelligently extract clean article text, images, tags, comments, and metadata from any web page. Rather than building site-specific scrapers, you can point Diffbot‘s Article API at any article URL and it will automatically return the extracted data in a structured format.
Diffbot is ideal for scraping articles at scale from a wide variety of sources. Its AI adapts to each page‘s layout to accurately identify and parse the article contents. Diffbot claims to work on 97%+ of article pages out of the box.
Diffbot provides SDKs for popular programming languages to integrate article extraction into your own apps and scripts. It also offers no-code integrations with tools like Google Sheets, Zapier, and Microsoft Flow, making it easy to build automated article scraping workflows.
Diffbot offers a generous free plan for up to 10,000 API calls per month. Paid plans unlock higher limits, dedicated support, and enterprise features like custom extraction rules, on-premises deployment, and data retention policies to comply with GDPR and CCPA regulations.
To illustrate how to use an article scraping tool, let‘s walk through an example of setting up an Octoparse scraper for the Towards Data Science publication on Medium.com:
Install Octoparse and open the application. Click the + icon to create a new task.
In the built-in browser, enter the Medium publication URL (e.g. https://towardsdatascience.com) and wait for it to load.
Scroll down the page a few times to load additional articles. Octoparse will automatically detect the pagination and prompt you to add a "Loop scroll down" command.
Hover over the first article card and click the "Select sub-elements" button. Choose "Select all" to identify the list of article elements.
In the data preview, rename the extracted fields and delete any you don‘t need. To get the article URL, hover over the title, right-click, and choose "Copy XPath". Paste this into a new column called "Article URL".
In the workflow, add an "Extract article data" command. Choose the "Article URL" column as the input.
Open one of the article URLs and identify the elements you want to extract (e.g. title, author, content, tags). For each one, hover over it, right-click, and "Copy XPath". Assign a name to each field in the data preview.
Save the task and click "Start Extraction". Octoparse will scrape the list of articles, follow the pagination, extract each individual article‘s data, and save it to your chosen output format and location.
To automate the scraping, set up a schedule (e.g. daily) or configure the webhook or API integration to run the scraper on demand.
Tips for Effective Article Scraping:
- Respect website terms of service and robots.txt instructions. Don‘t scrape sites that prohibit it.
- Use proxies, delays, and rate limiting to avoid overloading servers and getting your IP blocked.
- Verify the accuracy and completeness of your scraped data. Websites change over time and can break scrapers.
- Enrich and deduplicate article data as needed for your use case. Merge tags, standardize dates, etc.
- Store data securely and comply with relevant privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA. Give users opt-out choices.
- Monitor and maintain your scrapers to keep them running smoothly. Fix breaks and adapt to site changes.
In summary, article scraping is a powerful technique for automatically collecting news and blog articles at scale from a variety of web sources. Modern web scraping tools like Octoparse, ParseHub, and Diffbot make it easy to build robust article scrapers without coding.
To get started, identify your target websites and requirements, choose a scraping tool that fits your needs, and follow the tool‘s documentation and tutorials to build your first article scraper. Make sure to follow web scraping best practices to keep your scraping effective and ethical.
Happy article scraping!