SmartSpider

SmartSpider is a lightweight web crawler that mainly targets yellow pages websites, being able to download content such as phone numbers, email addresses, photos and Flash clips.

SmartSpider is powered by Java, which despite being a powerful technology, imposes a few limitations, mostly on appearance and speed. Thus, don’t expect it to impress you in terms of looks, but you can experiment with it to see if it compensates in functionality.

SmartSpider is not a program that can process any type of content, thus it must not be regarded as a universal download manager. It was designed with a focus on yellow pages, which makes it fit for small to medium businesses that are looking to build a directory of contacts.

Having been tailored to meet the interests of both beginners and professionals, SmartSpider proves an impressive downloading speed compared to similar software and with little effort, too.

At first launch, it prompts you to select the output folder, then it all comes down to specifying the address of the yellow pages site and selecting the type of content to be downloaded: email address, phone numbers, pictures and / or Flash SWF files.

The next step is to press the ‘Start / Stop’ button, at which point the application will connect to the specified resources and download the content that matches your preferences.

The pictures are saved in a separate folder, while emails, phone numbers and links are exported in individual HTML files.

The general impression that SmartSpider makes is that of a very straightforward application, proving a superior processing speed if we were to compare it with other software involved in this line of work.