Book description
The Internet, with its profusion of information, has made us hungry for ever more, ever better data. Out of necessity, many of us have become pretty adept with search engine queries, but there are times when even the most powerful search engines aren't enough. If you've ever wanted your data in a different form than it's presented, or wanted to collect data from several sites and see it side-by-side without the constraints of a browser, then Spidering Hacks is for you. Spidering Hacks takes you to the next level in Internet data retrieval--beyond search engines--by showing you how to create spiders and bots to retrieve information from your favorite sites and data sources. You'll no longer feel constrained by the way host sites think you want to see their data presented--you'll learn how to scrape and repurpose raw data so you can view in a way that's meaningful to you. Written for developers, researchers, technical assistants, librarians, and power users, Spidering Hacks provides expert tips on spidering and scraping methodologies. You'll begin with a crash course in spidering concepts, tools (Perl, LWP, out-of-the-box utilities), and ethics (how to know when you've gone too far: what's acceptable and unacceptable). Next, you'll collect media files and data from databases. Then you'll learn how to interpret and understand the data, repurpose it for use in other applications, and even build authorized interfaces to integrate the data into your own content. By the time you finish Spidering Hacks, you'll be able to:
Aggregate and associate data from disparate locations, then store and manipulate the data as you like
Gain a competitive edge in business by knowing when competitors' products are on sale, and comparing sales ranks and product placement on e-commerce sites
Integrate third-party data into your own applications or web sites
Make your own site easier to scrape and more usable to others
Keep up-to-date with your favorite comics strips, news stories, stock tips, and more without visiting the site every day
Like the other books in O'Reilly's popular Hacks series, Spidering Hacks brings you 100 industrial-strength tips and tools from the experts to help you master this technology. If you're interested in data retrieval of any type, this book provides a wealth of data for finding a wealth of data.
Publisher resources
Table of contents
- Contents
- Credits
- Preface
-
Walking Softly
- A Crash Course in Spidering and Scraping
- Best Practices for You and Your Spider
- Anatomy of an HTML Page
- Registering Your Spider
- Preempting Discovery
- Keeping Your Spider Out of Sticky Situations
- Finding the Patterns of Identifiers
-
Assembling a Toolbox
- Perl Modules
- Resources You May Find Helpful
- Installing Perl Modules
- Simply Fetching with LWP::Simple
- More Involved Requests with LWP:: UserAgent
- Adding HTTP Headers to Your Request
- Posting Form Data with LWP
- Authentication, Cookies, and Proxies
- Handling Relative and Absolute URLs
- Secured Access and Browser Attributes
- Respecting Your Scrapee’s Bandwidth
- Respecting robots.txt
- Adding Progress Bars to Your Scripts
- Scraping with HTML::TreeBuilder
- Parsing with HTML::TokeParser
- WWW::Mechanize 101
- Scraping with WWW::Mechanize
- In Praise of Regular Expressions
- Painless RSS with Template::Extract
- A Quick Introduction to XPath
- Downloading with curl and wget
- More Advanced wget Techniques
- Using Pipes to Chain Commands
- Running Multiple Utilities at Once
- Utilizing the Web Scraping Proxy
- Being Warned When Things Go Wrong
- Being Adaptive to Site Redesigns
-
Collecting Media Files
- Detective Case Study: Newgrounds
- Detective Case Study: iFilm
- Downloading Movies from the Library of Congress
- Downloading Images from Webshots
- Downloading Comics with dailystrips
- Archiving Your Favorite Webcams
- News Wallpaper for Your Site
- Saving Only POP3 Email Attachments
- Downloading MP3s from a Playlist
- Downloading from Usenet with nget
-
Gleaning Data from Databases
- Archiving Yahoo! Groups Messages with yahoo2mbox
- Archiving Yahoo! Groups Messages with WWW::Yahoo::Groups
- Gleaning Buzz from Yahoo!
- Spidering the Yahoo! Catalog
- Tracking Additions to Yahoo!
- Scattersearch with Yahoo! and Google
- Yahoo! Directory Mindshare in Google
- Weblog-Free Google Results
- Spidering, Google, and Multiple Domains
- Scraping Amazon.com Product Reviews
- Receive an Email Alert for Newly Added Amazon.com Reviews
- Scraping Amazon.com Customer Advice
- Publishing Amazon.com Associates Statistics
- Sorting Amazon.com Recommendations byRating
- Related Amazon.com Products with Alexa
- Scraping Alexa’s Competitive Data with Java
- Finding Album Information with FreeDB and Amazon.com
- Expanding Your Musical Tastes
- Saving Daily Horoscopes to Your iPod
- Graphing Data with RRDTOOL
- Stocking Up on Financial Quotes
- Super Author Searching
- Mapping O’Reilly Best Sellers to Library Popularity
- Using All Consuming to Get Book Lists
- Tracking Packages with FedEx
- Checking Blogs for New Comments
- Aggregating RSS and Posting Changes
- Using the Link Cosmos of Technorati
- Finding Related RSS Feeds
- Automatically Finding Blogs of Interest
- Scraping TV Listings
- What’s Your Visitor’s Weather Like?
- Trendspotting with Geotargeting
- Getting the Best Travel Route by Train
- Geographic Distance and Back Again
- Super Word Lookup
- Word Associations with Lexical Freenet
- Reformatting Bugtraq Reports
- Keeping Tabs on the Web via Email
- Publish IE’s Favorites to Your Web Site
- Spidering GameStop.com Game Prices
- Bargain Hunting with PHP
- Aggregating Multiple Search Engine Results
- Robot Karaoke
- Searching the Better Business Bureau
- Searching for Health Inspections
- Filtering for the Naughties
- Maintaining Your Collections
- Giving Back to the World
- Index (1/3)
- Index (2/3)
- Index (3/3)
Product information
- Title: Spidering Hacks
- Author(s):
- Release date: October 2003
- Publisher(s): O'Reilly Media, Inc.
- ISBN: 9780596005771
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