Show HN: Web scraping page analyzer

https://www.apify.com/page-analyzer

by jardah • 8 years ago

166 50 8 years ago

jardah19• 8 years ago

I'm still testing it and improving it (there are so many different websites with different responses...), so If you have any comments I'm looking forward to what you think about it.

GSGSGS2• 8 years ago

Are you Jaroslov ? :)

jardah19• 8 years ago

Jaroslav, yes, I'm the author. Did you notice any problems or ways how I can improve it?

rmateus• 8 years ago

Is it able to deal with digital certificates?

jancurn2• 8 years ago

You can use https://www.htbridge.com/ssl/ for that

_Chief• 8 years ago

how about caching the default entry (static url instead) + attribs, to ease demoing. at the moment it's been analyzing for more than >5mins

jardah19• 8 years ago

Good idea and I would implement that if I used an API from server to get the response. But currently I'm at the same time testing stability of Apify "Actor" solution and proxies, so for my case it's good that there are real requests with real responses, even if it's just from demo.

Btw the fact that it's running for 5 minutes is a bug, that I will look at, since there is a timeout of 2 minutes and there are no hanging runs or runs that ended with timeout.

JustARandomGuy• 8 years ago

Suppose I wanted to extract an image that gets loaded async via Javascript (For example, a Pinterest page). How would that work? Looking at your documentation, it looks like I could parse the XHR array you supply. Could you suggest any other ways? I'm calling out Pinterest as an example here because they try to block their images from being easily downloaded, but if you have any other examples I'd like to hear them.

It would be great if the page analyzer could supply a list of all the assets loaded with the web page; for example, any asset with a media type of image/* is listed in an images array, and so forth.

jardah19• 8 years ago

Actually the list of assets shouldn't be that hard. Looking at pinterest the xhr requests for images are loaded immediately when page is open, so potentialy it then it's catched in onRequest function (only now I'm aborting the requests to save network trafic). I will try it our tomorrow and let you know in comment.

Also, looking at pinterest, it's server rendered through ReactJS, so there is #initial-state script tag with first few images preloaded as urls, so if you cared only about the images on top without scrolling then this is the safest bet.

nickthemagicman• 8 years ago

Just wanted to say great tool!

jardah19• 8 years ago

Thank you, still lot's of things to improve (for example 404 handling) but it's great to see positive feedback.

dmarlow• 8 years ago

Is data shared between accounts if two accounts both want to retrieve information from the same exact URL?

jardah19• 8 years ago

Nope, there is no caching now, every run of the tool has a single instance and writes the output into separate file. I'm using it to test stability of cloud when multiple users are using it and to test proxies. It would not be much of a test if one user opened the demo page and then every other use would just get the results from a file. But when I'm happy with how it works I will add caching.

BrandoElFollito• 8 years ago

Is there a way to access an authenticated web site?

jardah19• 8 years ago

Sadly not for now. Our company has a solution for that (for some websites), but currently this tool does not have this functionality, since I wanted it be as simple as possible. Maybe in the future.

lanewinfield• 8 years ago

Authentication support on this would make it an instant purchase for me.

tcmb• 8 years ago

I entered a URL and pressed enter, wondering why nothing happened. Only then did I scroll down to find the 'Analyze' button. I wasn't looking for specific attributes, and the strong color contrast of that section made it look like nothing else of interest would come below.

jardah19• 8 years ago

Oh... Clearly I need to work on my UX skills, I will improve that in next iteration.

at_smith• 8 years ago

Awesome tool! How do you handle scraping data that's hiding behind layers of ~fancy~ JS libraries? Is it as simple as triggering click events, pausing for loading, and then grabbing the information?

jardah19• 8 years ago

This tool basicaly performs the simplest data loading, it opens the webpage, then waits till most xhr requests are done, wait's a second (tio give JS time to manipulate DOM) and then loads data from the page. This way, it has what user sees when he opens the page in browser. So if the data is visible, or loaded through XHR or hidden in global JS variable it will see it.

For more advanced usage (like clicking, or submiting a search request) it would need to have some kind of scenario like: "Click on this" -> "wait till this loads" -> "type something here" -> "scroll to this" -> load data.

Which is possible with headless chrome, so the trick is to make it general and easy to use (something like recording what user does through chrome plugin). Maybe in future versions :)

cseelus• 8 years ago

Could be an interesting enhancement. Sounds a little bit like what Capybara, a test framework for Ruby apps can do[1], things like

  click_link('Link Text')
  fill_in('Password', with: 'Seekrit')
  choose('A Radio Button')
  check('A Checkbox')
  uncheck('Another Checkbox')
  select('Option', from: 'Select Box')

1) https://github.com/teamcapybara/capybara#navigating

razki• 8 years ago

I'd have money on using Horseman with phantomjs in node.

bdcravens• 8 years ago

No, it says on the page it's using headless Chrome.

oodavid• 8 years ago

PhantomJS is dead. The arrival of Puppeteer rung the death knell.

oevi• 8 years ago

Nice work! It seems that it only supports microdata and not RDFa at the moment?

jardah19• 8 years ago

Yep only microdata. I completely forgot about RDFa. I'm immediately writing RDFa to my todo list. It would be a great addition.

anomie31• 8 years ago

Speaking of which, do you think you could support more ontologies than schema.org? It's easy to use schema.org without understanding the rest of the RDF ecosystem, so I'll elaborate in a minute, but I'm on my phone right now so it's difficult.

chadlavi• 8 years ago

We use this for some stuff at my office. It's handy.

alexroan• 8 years ago

Love this.

guilamu2• 8 years ago

Not giving me anything useful on this pretty straightforward table:

http://www.dsden93.ac-creteil.fr/spip/spip.php?page=ecoles

jardah19• 8 years ago

When I open the link in my browser it shows "0 école(s) correspondent à votre recherche" and no table, probably what happens to the analyzer too.

jardah19• 8 years ago

Yes, that is probably the problem, when I looked for the text it returned:

[ 0:{ "selector":".bloc-blanc > p:nth-child(1)" "text":" 0 école(s) correspondent à votre recherche " } ]

jardah19• 8 years ago

Aha! I see, it shows data based on POST request from FORM on this page http://www.dsden93.ac-creteil.fr/spip/spip.php?page=annu1d so if you provide just a link to the results page without the POST data then it will show you nothing. Sadly the tool currently does not allow for sending POST requests to the websites.

jardah19• 8 years ago

Just a quick update: Thank you for using it and playing around with it. Looking at the usage and results I found a quite a lot of things to improve. Which is great, since it's hard to develop something like this without real usage data.

nreece• 8 years ago

Cool tool!

* shameless plug * Our little startup, Feedity - https://feedity.com, helps create custom RSS feeds for any webpage, utilizing Chrome for full-rendering and many other tweaks & techniques under the hood for seamless & scalable indexing.

cstrat• 8 years ago

Looks awesome! Does the tool work when trying to access websites behind web application firewalls? eg. F5 WAF [1]

https://f5.com/glossary/web-application-firewall

jardah19• 8 years ago

Depends on whether we access the website from a proxy that is known by the WAF. But for most websites it's just a single normal request. If it's an issue in the future we could make browser extension, that will do the analytic on page loaded by the user, so that we don't have to use proxy to connect to it. If you are talking about actually scraping the websites, then that is usually on case by case scenario. Mostly it works, but sometimes it's a bit harder to get around.

petagonoral• 8 years ago

hmm, no joy getting rating information from an amazon.com product page

jardah19• 8 years ago

Amazon is unfortunately not using any metadata information for reviews (probably to prevent easy scraping for competing companies). You can only get it from from html (At least from what I can see).

Kikobeats• 8 years ago

Similar but just for getting normalized metadata: https://microlink.io

Show HN: Web scraping page analyzer

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