Dashblock

Dashblock is an application designed for Web Scraping that allows anyone to transform a website into an API, thanks to machine learning technology. And, after you save your custom APIs, you can query them with similar URLs to automatically receive all the structured data.

You ever wonder how devices and applications connect with each other to allow us to place an order, make a reservation, or book a flight with just a few taps or clicks? The hero behind all this is the Application Programming Interface, or, in short, the API. This is what makes possible all the interactivity we've come to expect and rely upon daily.

So what exactly is an API? To say it briefly, it is a set of protocols and routines that are used in building software applications. But if you want something more creative, think of it as a messenger who can be asked to get information from an online system, take its response for your request and send it right back to you.

Web Scraping is a technique used to extract large amounts of data from a website. Instead of manually copying and pasting the data, which is a very tedious job that will surely take many hours or sometimes days to complete, you can use Dashblock. With its intuitive system, you can extract the required data from websites with a few mouse clicks.

To make the best out of it, you have to make sure all the elements you want to extract have your custom labels attached to them. After that, just give it a few examples of the same attribute or element until the application understands the pattern, which usually happens after only 2 or 3 samples.

The issue with most generic Web Scraping software is that they are very tricky to set up and use, and there is also a steep learning curve involved. Dashblock was designed to solve this problem, by providing an intuitive point and click interface that lets you start extracting data within minutes.