Do you want to scrape data like books, videos, audio files, text, and web pages from Internet Archive? This article is here to help. This article provides you with the best Internet Archive scrapers to ease your data extraction procedure.
The practice of utilizing computer bots known as web scrapers to retrieve data such as web pages, text and even whole websites from Internet Archive website is known as Internet Archive scraping. Even if you don't have a lot of time to manually extract data from archive.org, this is the best option.
Once you've completed the procedure, you can use a web scraper to automate the process and save time and money in the long run. Archive.org web scrapers can be quite simple and yet do the job, but some would need to be more complex and include more advanced capabilities.
Archive.com can be used to scrape websites as well as historical documents, which may be of interest to you. The stringent anti-scraping mechanism of some websites makes it tough for some marketers and beginner scrapers to get their hands on information. When scraping content from these sites, use archive.com instead of going through the hassle of trying to scrape a website that refuses to be scraped if the content you're scraping isn't time-sensitive.
The Internet Archive Wayback Machine has the advantage of being scrapable. According to its own stated goals of scraping websites, the Internet Archive does not see anything improper when you scrape its website. It even provides an API for various scraping operations to make your scraping process easier.
A scraper for the Wayback Machine isn't required to scrape archive.org. This is because online scrapers specifically designed for this purpose already exist on the market. Archive.org can be scraped with the help of some of the greatest web scrapers, which I'll discuss in this portion of the post. Using some of these tools does not need writing a word of code, but others are designed specifically for programmers.
5 Best Internet Archive Scrapers in 2024
1. Octoparse — Best Internet Archive Scraper for Scraping Internet Archive Web Pages
- Price: Begins at 75 USD monthly
- Data Format: SQLServer, MySQL, JSON, Excel, CSV
- Free Option (14 days free trial)
- Platform Supported: Desktop, Cloud
It's also possible to utilize the Octoparse web scraper if you are searching for relevant data points on archive.org web pages. Octoparse is a simple-to-use web scraper that works even better when you want to extract the Internet Archive.
It's easier to use Octoparse than to scrape extract conventional websites, which have anti-scraping systems that block and detect scrapers that you'll have to work around. Octoparse has cloud server support for preserving your scraping jobs, the ability to schedule scraping, and more. It's a free tool, but new users get 14 days of free access.
2. ScrapeStorm — Best Internet Archive Scraper Effective for Scraping Audio Files and Web Pages from Internet Archive
- Price: Begins at 9.99 USD monthly
- Data Format: Google Sheets, MySQL, JSON, Excel, CSV, TXT
- Free Option (Free Starter Plan but has some limitations)
- Platform Supported: Cloud, Desktop
One of the well-regarded online scrapers, ScrapeStorm, has received a lot of positive reviews recently. My list of recommended web scrapers includes it because of its ability to scrape the Internet Archive Wayback Machine for a variety of different types of media, including web pages, documents, books, and audio files. In addition, you don't have to create a single line of code using this tool.
Using the archive.org web website, you only need to know how to point and click the data of interest. The program is a web scraper that may be used to extract data from any website, not only the Wayback Machine. Its use of AI makes it one of the most advanced technologies for automatically identifying data of relevance on a website without human intervention.
3. WebScraper.io (WebScraper.io Extension) — Best Internet Archive Scrape with Provision of Browser Extension
- Price: Free
- Data Format: JSON, XLSX, CSV
- Platform Supported: Firefox and Chrome (Browser Extension)
If you're a fan of browser extensions, you might want to check out WebScraper.io‘s Chrome plugin. Like other visual web scrapers, it provides a point-and-click interface to help you locate data of interest.
This web scraper is not very good at downloading whole web pages, as you should know. But it is beneficial for sifting through a page to find certain information. This is especially beneficial in cases where the information you're looking for may be found on an archived website. It's easy to get started with this web scraper because it's free and requires only a few clicks.
4. Wayback Machine Scraper (Wayback Machine Scraper by Sangaline) — Best Internet Archive Scraper for Python Programmers
- Price: Free
- Data Format: JSON, CSV
- Platform Supported: CLI Application
If you want to extract time-series data from the archive.org website, you can rely on the Wayback Machine Scraper. It is a CLI tool built as part of the Scrapy middleware. Due to the fact that it is a Python-based web scraper, only Python programmers are able to utilize Scrapy middleware. An open-source Internet Archive scraper may be found on Github and can be downloaded.
Even if you use it for business purposes, there is no charge. This is the web scraper for you if you want to grab a whole website from the archive.org domain. One of the things you'll appreciate is how customizable it is. PIP install Wayback-machine-scraper is an easy way to get it up and running.
5. Wayback Machine Downloader — Best Internet Archive Scraper for Both Coders and Non-coders
- Price: Begins at 15 USD
- Platform Supported: Desktop
The Wayback Machine Downloader has been built to be used by non-coders as well. The method taken by this service is quite specialized. As long as you simply want to download copies of pages or the entire website, you may use a standard scraper for archive.org to accomplish the job for you.
The website can even be restored to WordPress if it was originally built on WordPress. Although the Wayback Machine Downloader is a subscription-based service, new users can take advantage of a free trial period.
How to Use BeautifulSoup, Requests, and Python to scrape Internet Archive
If you're interested in learning how to create a custom scraper for archive.org, you might be interested to hear that it's not challenging if you have coding skills. If you don't know how to code, go ahead to the next part, where you may pick from a list of archive.org web scrapers that I suggest. This section is for individuals who do know how to code.
You may write a web scraper in any programming language as long as it has an HTTP request library and a parsing library. We'll be using Python in this tutorial since it's easy to learn even for non-python programmers, and it has a number of easy-to-use scraping packages.
There are a number of libraries that can help you with Internet Archive scraping. What you want to scrape will dictate which library you choose. To automate operations that require the execution of Javascript, you'll need Selenium, a browser Automator. Requests and BeautifulSoup, on the other hand, might suffice if Javascript wasn't necessary. Requests is a third-party Python module for submitting HTTP requests. In contrast, Beautifulsoup is a high-level library that uses parsers to let you navigate and extract data from HTML pages.
Archive.org scraping has the advantage of not requiring you to deal with the complexities of normal web scraping. When it comes to web scraping, some newbies choose to use archive.org rather than scrape directly from the website.
This is because, unlike when scraping from other websites, they won't have to cope with anti-blocks or other anti-scraping efforts. To avoid scraping the erroneous URL, during scraping URLs, you must check URLs before scraping them.
FAQs
Q. Does Internet Archive permit data scraping from its website?
Yes. You can scrape data from Internet Archive without any issue as it allows scrapers to scrape its data.
Conclusion
It's not immediately clear, but if you look at the list above, you'll realize that there is some sort of grouping. For non-coders, there is Sangaline's Wayback Machine Scraper and the rest of them. ScrapeStorm, WebScraper.io, and Octoparse are online scrapers for non-coders that want to extract specific data from an archive.org web page. Wayback Machine Downloader is the best for you if you want to scrape the entire web page or the entire website.
