Show HN: Browserless.io now has a scraping API

14 points·mrskitch··4 comments

You can now scrape information off of page, powered by headless chrome, using browserless.io in the cloud. Docs for this feature are here: https://docs.browserless.io/docs/scrape.html, and we even include helpful debugging information like screenshots, network calls and more.

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Hey, nice work. It might be useful though to explain why one would use this over something like beautiful soup or the dozens of other scraping libraries out there.

In my mind, I see the target audience already needing programming skills. That same audience would be comfortable just using a free scraping library.

But maybe there is some functionality or ease of use that would make your offering a better choice.

Is there a list somewhere of scraping libraries and/or tools? I am struggling to find a product that will allow easy scraping of websites with little to no programming. Something a non-developer could use.

e: Nevermind, found this: https://github.com/cassidoo/scrapers

Yup, that's a great point. This does help those with familiarity about REST APIs get started, and those wo a lot of puppeteer background.

I think the more recent chrome extension examples are pretty interesting, and we're looking to go that direction at some point.

Thanks again!

mmm billing by second can become extremely expensive as it doesn't depend only on the client-side but also on the speed of your servers. Why don't you bill by request like https://proxycrawl.com

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