Reliable and Accurate Web Scraping (UK Based)

For dirt-cheap web scraping, search Elance for “web scrapping” (!) Good luck!

For reliable and accurate web scraping, go to a professional web scraping company like ScraperWiki or an independent software engineer like me.

I offer pay-monthly managed web scraping starting at $50 per month, depending on size and complexity.

My Web Scraping Experience

I’m a Software Engineer with a background in Electronic Engineering. I write clean and supportable code - see some of my work on GitHub.

I’ve written high-reliability web scrapers for many commercial clients at ScraperWiki as well as for my own projects.

Examples of my web scraping work:

  • web scraping company financial reports
  • pulling property price data from an API
  • web scraping director and shareholder information from eg. Companies House
  • web scraping news bulletins from stock exchanges
  • processing procurement data to power parts of UK Government
  • generating an events calendar from bookings on JustPark
  • reliable commodity price web scraping
  • accurate utility bill web scraping
  • scraping contact details from thousands of websites

Web Scraping as a Service

First and foremost contact ScraperWiki. They have the capacity to take on large, complex projects and their Data Scientists can do additional data visualisation and analysis.

Disclaimer: I worked for ScraperWiki in 20132014. They’re great and we’re still friends!

If they’re not suitable for you, email me with your specific requirements and we can arrange a call to discuss further.

I particularly enjoy working with charities, NGOs and Governments and I only do “ethical scraping” so no spammers please!

Data Output

After web scraping I can provide a data feed in many different forms, for example:

  • Daily / weekly / monthly email attachment.
  • JSON API endpoint.
  • Regular SQL database dump.
  • SMS / Fax / Letter (!)
  • Most other ways you can think of!

Ethical Web Scraping

I believe in “ethical scraping”, operating within a set of principles:

  • A website that welcomes human visitors should welcome robots too.
  • A website should not discriminate against well-behaved robots; one that welcomes Google should welcome others too.
  • A scraper bot should try to identify itself as such, preferably with a contact URL and/or email address.
  • A scraper bot should not disrupt the service being scraped (it should use rate limiting and backoff).
  • A scraper should not be built to gain free access to an otherwise paid-for data product.
  • A scraper should not attempt to circumvent the security of a website.
  • A scraper should not facilitate plagiarism or copyright infringement.
  • A scraper should not help spammers or bad guys.
  • A scraper should not use anonymising proxies, Tor or dirty tricks to hide its origin.

If that’s all cool with you, then get in touch.

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