Scraping websites can be a time consuming process and when limited computing resources are available, combined with the need for frequent and up to date data, having a fast running robot is essential. A single robot can take anywhere from hours to weeks to complete a run, thus making a robot just fractionally more efficient could save a lot of valuable time.

There are a number of ways to optimize your robot to run faster, replacing setTimeout with our internal wait function, careful usage of loops, not using excessive delay timers in step done function, etc. However, one of the best methods so far been has proven to be using ajax requests instead of visiting a website […]

At Web Robots we have a fanatical customer support. Large part of this is doing technical support for robot developers. For this we maintain live chatrooms, often do screenshares, joint code writing sessions with each of our customers’ development teams. This helps us solve most of the problems our customers encounter in minutes, difficult ones in several hours. This is not an exaggeration.

Based on the accumulated experience we were able to identify a list of the most common mistakes that robot writers can make. We published a list with specific code examples that illustrate the mistakes. Then each mistake has an explanation and a code example with solution. This list is highly recommended read for […]

We get a lot of requests to scrape data from Yelp. These requests come in on a daily basis, sometimes several times a day. At the same time we have not seen a good business case for a commercial project with scraping Yelp.

We have decided to release a simple example Yelp robot which anyone can run on Chrome inside your computer, tune to your own requirements and collect some data. With this robot you can save business contact information like address, postal code, telephone numbers, website addresses etc.  Robot is placed in our Demo space on Web Robots portal for anyone to use, just sign up, find the robot and use it.