As a frequent traveler I often stay at Marriott hotels and noticed they recently upgraded and redesigned their website.
Why is this interesting in a blog about Web Data Services?
Marriott has just done what so many other companies are doing these days – they are modernizing their website with a user-friendly, dynamic AJAX-based interface to enhance user experience.
While AJAX is helpful for creating interactive web applications like a hotel reservation system, it’s very bad news for business users who depend on collecting web data with home grown scripts and primitive web scrapers to empower business applications like Market Intelligence, Financial Research, and Buzz Analytics.
But don’t despair. Kapow Technologies just released version 7.1 of Kapow Web Data Server which includes support for even the most sophisticated AJAX toolkits, including Google Web ToolKit.
That said I couldn’t write this blog post without testing it out myself.
So I powered up RoboMaker 7.1, typed in www.mariott.com, and did a simple search for hotels near San Francisco airport.
Then a dynamic map (powered by Microsoft bing) appeared showing the locations of the 10 nearest Marriott hotels. I wanted to create a loop over the ten hotels on the map, so I simply clicked on hotel number 1, clicked the insert loop command, and in a few minutes I had created a Kapow robot that could extract hotels directly from a highly dynamic, AJAX-based map.
Tell me about any other product on the planet that can do this in 2 minutes!
Check out the picture below, and be sure to think about Kapow Web Data Server when your current Web Data Extraction tools break in the world of modern AJAX powered web sites.
Source: http://kapowsoftware.com/blog/index.php/tag/web-scraping
Note:
Why is this interesting in a blog about Web Data Services?
Marriott has just done what so many other companies are doing these days – they are modernizing their website with a user-friendly, dynamic AJAX-based interface to enhance user experience.
While AJAX is helpful for creating interactive web applications like a hotel reservation system, it’s very bad news for business users who depend on collecting web data with home grown scripts and primitive web scrapers to empower business applications like Market Intelligence, Financial Research, and Buzz Analytics.
But don’t despair. Kapow Technologies just released version 7.1 of Kapow Web Data Server which includes support for even the most sophisticated AJAX toolkits, including Google Web ToolKit.
That said I couldn’t write this blog post without testing it out myself.
So I powered up RoboMaker 7.1, typed in www.mariott.com, and did a simple search for hotels near San Francisco airport.
Then a dynamic map (powered by Microsoft bing) appeared showing the locations of the 10 nearest Marriott hotels. I wanted to create a loop over the ten hotels on the map, so I simply clicked on hotel number 1, clicked the insert loop command, and in a few minutes I had created a Kapow robot that could extract hotels directly from a highly dynamic, AJAX-based map.
Tell me about any other product on the planet that can do this in 2 minutes!
Check out the picture below, and be sure to think about Kapow Web Data Server when your current Web Data Extraction tools break in the world of modern AJAX powered web sites.
Source: http://kapowsoftware.com/blog/index.php/tag/web-scraping
Note:
Delta Ray is experienced web scraping consultant and writes
articles on Hotels
Data Scraping, Hotelpronto, Expedia, Tripadvisor
Data Scraping, Amazon Product Scraping, Linkedin Email Scraping, Screen
Scraping Services, Yelp Review Scraping and yellowpages data scraping etc.
