IRobotSoft

A web-scraping tool to extract content from web-sites.

Pros: IRobotSoft is a professional web-scraping tool which is useful for downloading all sorts of content from any given website. In addition to the basic scraping utility it features a powerful automation engine. You can extract links, write extracted data to XML, download linked files, export content to spreadsheets, extract tables, automatically fill forms, and more. It features a multi-threaded robot engine that improves efficiency and has built-in support for interaction with a database, and customized parsing. The Internet Robot is also capable of recording user actions and then these recorded actions can be used for automated extraction (in cases where the extraction process may be more involved), notice also that you can use the Robot to record other actions that you may want to automate (not necessarily related to content extraction) – for example, you can share a specific aspect of your web experience (say, the way that you use a particular website) with friends and family. Batch form submissions, Batch data submission into/from Databases, automated MP3 downloading, and a toolbar are other bells and whistles. The toolbar has Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail web-mail notification, weather and more.

Cons: The interface is drag and it would really have helped the tool a lot if this had been improved. It really does take a fair amount of time to learn how to use and be fully functional – for example it is not a simple task to get the recording function to work as you want it to. Also, it only works on Windows OS and nothing else. No DOM parsing and support for anonymous proxies. A strange limitation (for a tool with several features) is that there is no way to create RSS feeds.

Overall: 4 stars. The web-scraper is a good one, interface needs improvement, and there are some other minor limitations.

IRobot is the Internet-robot engine for Web automation and Web computing. Completely automatic Web recording. Create your own IRobot Web agents to automate everything on the Web. Support Web data integration and computation. Share your Web experience with your friends. Batch form submissions. IRobot is all you need for Web computing. Test Web interfaces with our powerful automation engine. Features of IRobot include: 1. Multi-thread robots surfing; 2. Internet robot recording; 3. Automated Web extraction, computation; 4. Batch data submission from databases; 5. Save data into databases; 6. Hiding in the taskbar; Our feature robots include: Gene sequence downloading, BaiDu MP3 downloading, Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail Web mail notification, Monster job hunting, Hotornot dating, and many more...