{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/easyspider-a-no-code-visual-system-for","title":"EasySpider: A No-Code Visual System for Crawling the Web","arxiv_id":null,"date":"2023-04-30","proceeding":"ACM The Web Conference 2023 4","authors":["Naibo Wang","Wenjie Feng","Jianwei Yin","See-Kiong Ng"],"abstract":"The web is a treasure trove for data that is increasingly used by computer scientists for building large machine learning models as well as non-computer scientists for social studies or marketing analyses. As such, web-crawling is an essential tool for both computational and non-computational scientists to conduct research. However, most of the existing web crawler frameworks and software products either require professional coding skills without an easy-to-use graphic user interface or are expensive and limited in features. They are thus not friendly to newbies and inconvenient for complicated web-crawling tasks.\r\n\r\nIn this paper, we present an easy-to-use visual web crawler system, EasySpider, for designing and executing web crawling tasks without coding. The workflow of a new web crawling task can be visually programmed by following EasySpider’s visual wizard on the target webpages using an intuitive point-and-click interface. The generated crawler task can then be easily invoked locally or as a web service. Our EasySpider is cross-platform and flexible to adapt to different web-resources. It also supports advanced configuration for complicated tasks and extension. The whole system is open-sourced and transparent for free-access at GitHub, which avoids possible privacy leakage.","url_abs":"https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3543873.3587345","url_pdf":"https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3543873.3587345","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"easyspider-a-no-code-visual-system-for","repo_url":"https://github.com/NaiboWang/EasySpider","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"data-integration","task_name":"Data Integration"},{"task_slug":"marketing","task_name":"Marketing"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":null,"method_name":null},{"method_slug":"wizard","method_name":"Wizard"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}