If you have a business or a website online and you ever wished there was an easier way to "extract" content, emails, or links from a web page, you will be happy to know there is. A lot of people do this by hand, which could take anywhere from a few days to weeks on end. The only reason they do it by hand is simply because they are not aware of Visual Web Ripper software. This program works very quickly and is very simple.

The Goal

The whole goal to buying something like a web ripper is to extract information. Plain and simple. It can be for email lists, phone numbers, URLs, people's names, products, search results and much more.

The Features

Depending on the program you use, you will obviously have different features. For something like Visual Web Ripper, you can find features such as: Very user friendly visual project designer, Extract complete data structures, such as product catalogues, Repeatedly submit forms for all possible input values, Extract data from highly dynamic web sites including AJAX web sites, Save data to CSV, Excel, XML and Databases, Web data extraction scheduler with email notifications and logging and Custom post-processing and comprehensive API.

The Process

Again, it is very simple which is probably why this is a very popular program to buy. Depending on the "content" you are trying to extract as well as the site, you will do each one differently. However, all of the processes have the same steps. Let's extract information for company data via an online phone book:

1- You need to open your program and enter the URL of the web site from which you want to extract the information.

2- Next, do a search for all of the car rental places (or whatever you are searching for) in whatever city, state or country you choose to. In this case, let's say Pittsburgh PA.

3- You need to create a "job" or task for the program. For example, if you want to extract phone numbers, you have to tell the program that is what you want to do.

4- Once you create the new task and your new page is loaded for car rentals in Pittsburgh PA, you will need to capture the content. Once you capture the content, whatever it may be, you can then save it as a CSV, Excel, XML and Databases.

A World (Wide Web) Full of Choices

There is virtually no limit to the uses for web extraction software.

Beyond using this for social calls, you can also do a lot of research because of this and find companies that are actually interested in what you are selling. Visual Web Ripper is used frequently to gather prospect information and build contact lists. This is about saving time, possibly making sales and making your time on the Internet more efficient.