OutWit Hub

OutWit Hub is a Web scraping software application designed to automatically extract information from online or local resources. It recognizes and grabs links, images, documents, contacts, recurring vocabulary and phrases, rss feeds and converts structured and unstructured data into formatted tables which can be exported to spreadsheets or databases. The first version was released in 2010. Version 5.0 was released in January 2016.

Contents

• Versions
• Features
• Advanced features
• Similar Tools
• References

The program includes a Mozilla-based browser and a side bar which gives access to a number of views with pre-set extractors. Web pages and textual documents are broken down into their different constituents, presented as tables in these views. The application can navigate through series of links and sequences of search engine results pages to extract information elements, organize them in tables and export them to various formats. The predefined extractors allow to collect structured tables, lists or feeds. Custom scrapers can also be created to extract data from less structured page elements. Regular expressions can be included in scrapers as well as in other parts of the application to define variable recognition markers.

Although OutWit Hub is presented as a tool for non-technical users, the fact that the application doesn't use the DOM structure for its extractions prevents visual "point & grab" data scraping and forces the user who wants to create custom scrapers to define markers in the source code of the page. The advantage of this approach, however, is that it allows a more precise definition of extraction masks than HTML nodes and faster execution, as the DOM tree doesn't need to be rendered by the browser at extraction time.