Scrapinghub Becomes Zyte, Releases a No-Code Scraping Tool
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New Brand Image
The changes are overarching and affect multiple aspects of the company. The website was outfitted with a new design and brand language; Crawlera changed name to Smart Proxy Manager; and you’ll no longer find Scrapinghub on Twitter – it’s @ZyteData now.
In an introductory blog post, Zyte’s CEO Shane Evans explains that the changes were prompted by the desire for the brand “to reflect who we are and where we’re going”. The company wants to move away from its image of people doing “low-level web scraping” and rather focus on web data delivery with customers at the forefront.
From what we can see, this translates to simpler interfaces, more high-level data collection tools, and tired (but probably effective) phrases that corporate clients love like “game changing”, “world-class”, and “sustainable growth”.
No-Code Data Collection Tool
The visual makeover was accompanied by the launch of a new product – Automatic Extraction (-or?). According to Zyte, it’s a scalable and reliable tool that allows extracting news, product, and other data without any coding experience.
Looking at the reveal information, using Automatic Extraction is as simple as entering an URL and specifying the data you want. The tool then invokes AI-based algorithms to download, clean up, and present that data in your format of choice. It supports over 40 languages and can handle millions of requests per month.
Automatic Extraction has been in open beta since 2019, in the form of an API. Today, API remains as one of the options for the techies. They can use it with multiple popular programming languages, or via a custom-built Python library.
Automatic Extraction costs $60 for 100k monthly requests.
Start of a New Era?
These changes bring us conflicting emotions. On the one hand, we really liked the Scrapinghub brand, and seeing it go makes us think that the company has lost a part of its spirit. On the other hand, the transformation was probably necessary for it to evolve. Looking at Zyte’s new direction, and the product it has given birth to, we can’t help but feel excited to see where this will take them.
