80legs

Start by deciding exactly what you need to collect—fields like title, price, rating, contact info, or article body. In 80legs, create a crawl app that defines how to find links and what to extract using simple JavaScript selectors. Upload a list of seed URLs or paste a sitemap, set domain rules and URL patterns to follow, and run a quick test on a handful of pages. Once the output looks right, schedule the job and let the platform handle the heavy lifting: politeness controls, proxy rotation, retries, and de-duplication. Results land in your storage as clean, structured data you can immediately use.

For market and competitor tracking, build a recurring crawl that gathers product details, pricing, and availability from target sites, then enrich with reviews or ratings from other sources. Add normalization steps to convert currencies and dates, validate required fields, and flag anomalies for manual review. Export to CSV or JSON, or push straight into your warehouse through the ETL connector. Set automated schedules (daily/weekly), receive alerts on failures or unexpected deltas, and compare snapshots over time to spot trends, pricing changes, and assortment shifts without babysitting the process.

Developers can compose modular logic for scale. Break your crawler into link-discovery rules, extraction functions, and post-processing steps. Use filters to constrain depth, restrict subdomains, and ignore duplicate content. Configure host-level throttling and retries, and rely on built-in IP rotation to reduce blocks. Integrate with your CI/CD by triggering crawls via API, streaming logs, and fetching results programmatically. Start from prebuilt app templates for common page layouts, then tweak the JavaScript to fit unique site structures. When input lists reach thousands of URLs, upload them in bulk and let the platform distribute workload across its cloud infrastructure.

If you need fast time-to-data, pull from 80legs’ ready-to-use datasets to skip building a crawler altogether—ideal for lead lists, business profiles, product catalogs, or location data. For broad coverage or research-scale projects, tap into large web snapshots to run aggregate analyses, measure content changes across the open web, or create reproducible samples for academic studies. Combine this with document parsing to extract text from PDFs you encounter, and store everything in the cloud for team access. Respect site policies by sticking to public pages and honoring exclusion rules. With repeatable workflows, clear scheduling, and reliable output formats, you can move from idea to analysis in hours instead of weeks.