Spidering Hacks (Paperback)

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

Credits  

Preface  

Chapter 1. Walking Softly 

      1. A Crash Course in Spidering and Scraping  

      2. Best Practices for You and Your Spider  

      3. Anatomy of an HTML Page  

      4. Registering Your Spider  

      5. Preempting Discovery  

      6. Keeping Your Spider Out of Sticky Situations  

      7. Finding the Patterns of Identifiers  

Chapter 2. Assembling a Toolbox 

    Perl Modules

    Resources You May Find Helpful

      8. Installing Perl Modules  

      9. Simply Fetching with LWP::Simple  

      10. More Involved Requests with LWP::UserAgent  

      11. Adding HTTP Headers to Your Request  

      12. Posting Form Data with LWP  

      13. Authentication, Cookies, and Proxies  

      14. Handling Relative and Absolute URLs  

      15. Secured Access and Browser Attributes  

      16. Respecting Your Scrapee's Bandwidth  

      17. Respecting robots.txt  

      18. Adding Progress Bars to Your Scripts  

      19. Scraping with HTML::TreeBuilder  

      20. Parsing with HTML::TokeParser  

      21. WWW::Mechanize 101  

      22. Scraping with WWW::Mechanize  

      23. In Praise of Regular Expressions  

      24. Painless RSS with Template::Extract  

      25. A Quick Introduction to XPath  

      26. Downloading with curl and wget  

      27. More Advanced wget Techniques  

      28. Using Pipes to Chain Commands  

      29. Running Multiple Utilities at Once  

      30. Utilizing the Web Scraping Proxy  

      31. Being Warned When Things Go Wrong  

      32. Being Adaptive to Site Redesigns  

Chapter 3. Collecting Media Files 

      33. Detective Case Study: Newgrounds  

      34. Detective Case Study: iFilm  

      35. Downloading Movies from the Library of Congress
      36. Downloading Images from Webshots  

      37. Downloading Comics with dailystrips  

      38. Archiving Your Favorite Webcams  

      39. News Wallpaper for Your Site  

      40. Saving Only POP3 Email Attachments  

      41. Downloading MP3s from a Playlist  

      42. Downloading from Usenet with nget  

Chapter 4. Gleaning Data from Databases 

      43. Archiving Yahoo! Groups Messages with yahoo2mbox  

      44. Archiving Yahoo! Groups Messages with WWW::Yahoo::Groups  

      45. Gleaning Buzz from Yahoo!  

      46. Spidering the Yahoo! Catalog  

      47. Tracking Additions to Yahoo!  

      48. Scattersearch with Yahoo! and Google  

      49. Yahoo! Directory Mindshare in Google  

      50. Weblog-Free Google Results  

      51. Spidering, Google, and Multiple Domains  

      52. Scraping Amazon.com Product Reviews  

      53. Receive an Email Alert for Newly Added Amazon.com Reviews
      54. Scraping Amazon.com Customer Advice  

      55. Publishing Amazon.com Associates Statistics  

      56. Sorting Amazon.com Recommendations by Rating  

      57. Related Amazon.com Products with Alexa  

      58. Scraping Alexa's Competitive Data with Java  

      59. Finding Album Information with FreeDB and Amazon.com  

      60. Expanding Your Musical Tastes  

      61. Saving Daily Horoscopes to Your iPod  

      62. Graphing Data with RRDTOOL  

      63. Stocking Up on Financial Quotes  

      64. Super Author Searching  

      65. Mapping O'Reilly Best Sellers to Library Popularity  

      66. Using All Consuming to Get Book Lists  

      67. Tracking Packages with FedEx  

      68. Checking Blogs for New Comments  

      69. Aggregating RSS and Posting Changes  

      70. Using the Link Cosmos of Technorati  

      71. Finding Related RSS Feeds  

      72. Automatically Finding Blogs of Interest  

      73. Scraping TV Listings  

      74. What's Your Visitor's Weather Like?  

      75. Trendspotting with Geotargeting  

      76. Getting the Best Travel Route by Train  

      77. Geographic Distance and Back Again  

      78. Super Word Lookup  

      79. Word Associations with Lexical Freenet  

      80. Reformatting Bugtraq Reports  

      81. Keeping Tabs on the Web via Email  

      82. Publish IE's Favorites to Your Web Site  

      83. Spidering GameStop.com Game Prices  

      84. Bargain Hunting with PHP  

      85. Aggregating Multiple Search Engine Results  

      86. Robot Karaoke  

      87. Searching the Better Business Bureau  

      88. Searching for Health Inspections  

      89. Filtering for the Naughties  

Chapter 5. Maintaining Your Collections 

      90. Using cron to Automate Tasks  

      91. Scheduling Tasks Without cron  

      92. Mirroring Web Sites with wget and rsync  

      93. Accumulating Search Results Over Time  

Chapter 6. Giving Back to the World 

      94. Using XML::RSS to Repurpose Data  

      95. Placing RSS Headlines on Your Site  

      96. Making Your Resources Scrapable with Regular Expressions  

      97. Making Your Resources Scrapable with a REST Interface  

      98. Making Your Resources Scrapable with XML-RPC  

      99. Creating an IM Interface  

      100. Going Beyond the Book  

Index