FMiner Professional

Since the Internet holds most of today's information and makes it available to anyone with an active connection, being up to date is slightly difficult. However, website verification and automatic data collectors have been here for a while, with FMiner Professional being a suitable example of these so-called web scraping applications.

Although contested by some websites as violating legal terms of privacy, the method is commonly used to gather data and stay up to date with changes, remaining perfectly legal. With this in mind, the application is designed to make it all look easy.

With a well-organized interface composed of several data analysis sections that can be re-arranged, you come across no accommodation problems. An integrated web browser is put at your disposal so that all work is concentrated in one place. Up to five tabs can be accessed and filled with pages of interest.

You mostly get to work with a set of macro commands that are available in a side panel. They are simply triggered by hitting the “record” button which makes the application track your every interaction with the opened page.

When recording is done, you are free to arrange the way elements are triggered in the macro process, and even have them put to a test. All actions are monitored and displayed in a real-time updating log, with highlighted text to indicate either errors or successful attempts.

An implemented scheduler gives you the possibility to save and store data at given intervals of time, but sadly, with no option to receive notifications when changes or errors occur. However, progress is saved when the check is complete, and you can also do this manually to save data either to XLS or CSV formats.

Taking everything into consideration, we can say that FMiner Professional is a practical scraping tool which does not really require a lot of effort on your behalf. When you're done with configurations, it can stay hidden in the system tray and constantly be on the lookout for changes or errors.