Automated Web Data Extraction Saves Your Time

Web data extraction is the process of collecting information from web pages online. The extracted data can then be stored and analyzed to obtain information for decision support, or to initiate other business processes. Specifically, you may extract web data to compare prices, monitor web pages for changes, collect research data, or to update your web pages with fresh information automatically.

Of course, extracting web data manually is perhaps the best method, because of the non-structured nature of most information on the Web, together with the fact that you often need to make decisions on the what and how of data extraction. But this would make it very hard for you to do it frequently and severely restrict the amount of data you can collect. Clearly you want to automate most if not all such web data extraction. Mergemill Pro includes features that enable you to do that.

When reading data from an HTML file or web page, Mergemill Pro provides you the options of extracting all link texts, all link URLs, the body HTML, or the plain body text from the document. You may then apply the fetch filter to capture just the strings of text you need. It is important to mention that Mergemill Pro's fetch filter allows you to apply regular expression matching to extract data. If this is not enough, you may use Mergemill Pro's easy-to-learn scripting tags in your templates to filter your data a second time to obtain the exact ones you need. Even further, Mergemill Pro lets you apply BASIC codes to select, clean up, and process your data in ways other web data extractors simply cannot do. With Mergemill Pro, you may also customize your output to present the processed information in the most meaningful and useful way.

Extensive web data extraction may be against the terms of use of some websites. It is therefore important to ensure that what you do does not conflict with the interests of the site owner. Outright duplication of original content should always be avoided.

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